Indeed. With a historical performance of 9% a year returns and a 100% employer match, you'd have to be pretty pessimistic about the future of the economy to not have a 401k. (Though one could argue that taxes will be higher in the future, and so paying taxes now might be better than paying taxes when you take the distribution.)

You don't even have to manage the split yourself, there are plenty of mutual funds that target certain retirement year changes and rebalance the portfolio as appropriate (basically: less risky investments as your retirement date nears). There are fees for this, of course, but for my fund they amount to $90 per 10 years per $10,000 invested. I think that's worth it if you don't want to actively manage your retirement portfolio.