If bit's not for generating free money.. or at least doesn't come up with at least a reasonable offer of some interest, why would people be INTEREST-ED in running a cpu intensive program that uses more power than everything else, and only pays out if your in a pool, that has clearly shown does NOT always forward payments, at least from what I've read here so far..
It's just a currency, man. Like putting funds into a Paypal account. You certainly don't have to run the generator if you don't want to donate the CPU time to it - just use the client to make transactions.
The primary purpose of Bitcoins isn't to MAKE money; it IS money, just in a different form. The whole generation thing is only to distribute the initial population of coins. Personally I'm of the opinion that if I had learned about it earlier, I could have made some decent money with the coins that are now worth more than they did months/years ago, but generation is too difficult now for that to be economically feasible for my single-computer setup. Oh well, kinda sucks, but it's not the end of the world and I can still use the currency just fine.