This is how I use Twitter now -- to consume news and discuss said news with my social circles. I certainly wouldn't be upset if Twitter took this as the core use case of the product.
Twitter is like RSS for people who don't know what RSS is. And I mean that in a good way. :)
Totally agree, I think Twitter understands this too, their their recent work in NLP to analyze trends, and grouping tweets to create adhoc discussion board like centralizations of discussions.