I'd suggest that Blizzard's decision to charge an extra fee for their new cross-server friend-list queueing feature is drawing ire because it calls out precisely how absurd it is that picking the wrong server at launch means that you can never group with anyone who went elsewhere. Between phasing, cross server queues, cross-server chat, and now cross-server grouping, Blizzard has already blended together its servers to such an extent that this feels like this should be a core game feature.
Beyond that, you have to wonder whether any future MMO will ever go with the fixed server model again going forward. Get the number of servers wrong and you either have unhappy customers stuck on deserted servers or unhappy customers stuck in queues, either of which will get you bad launch press. Get it right and you have unhappy customers constantly pestering you to make it easier for them to actually play with their friends in a nominally social genre - let's be clear here, this new feature will take Blizzard some amount of time and therefore money to implement, and none of this would be necessary with a more flexible server model.
Community is a big part of what keeps players involved in MMO's. As MMO's make more use of soloing and instances, there's less and less community on any individual server - the old EQ server community model is already dead. This story is just another chapter in the tale of why fixed servers are now more trouble than they're worth.