I think we all would have preferred a route that didn't require creating a new currency, but this was the best approach they could find to moving forward on their vision. Certainly the long-term hope is that the stellar will mostly help provide liquidity between other currencies, rather than become something used primarily as a first-class currency itself.
The distribution strategy here is actually something that, as far as I know, has never been tried before. It's correspondingly very difficult to know exactly how it'll turn out. The underlying motivation is to distribute the stellar as fairly and as rapidly as possible, and this model (given lots of transparency and upfrontness) was the best they could think of. (If you come up with a better one, I'd certainly love to hear it — I'm gdb@stripe.com if you'd like to talk more.)
I understand that peer-to-peer is also a possible use case, but realistically the people who don't know how to mine aren't going to care about transferring cryptocurrencies... that's why the gateways are valuable in the first place.