Great article, but the fear is larger than simply clear text passwords and sniffing. I linked to your article and sent this out to some friends and co-workers: I haven't heard of this one yet, but the simplicty of this is brilliant.

So you have a wireless AP that your laptop is now fully dependant on for IP services. What would a cracker do next? Well he/she has several options, not limited to straight sniffing of 'clear-text' packets as the article explains. This could be much more severe...

Here is a scenario that I just thought up:

Cracker visits local banking sites, and downloads all of their login webpages, caching them locally on his laptop. Cracker then updates a locally hosted DNS server to map major banking sites to his login page. You enter your banking information. Cracker grabs your pin and bank card number, then forwards you to a "service unavailable" page..

You assume banking is down, the cracker assumes your banking identity.

Could be applied to any frequent site, but banking is one of the more damaging.