At the risk of outing myself as "naive": I do not see this as a problem like MZMcBride does. I think the foundation should have earned our trust by now and them locking down the data does not seem like a credible threat to me. In any case:
a) you can download dumps to access the data independently from WMF b) the replication to the TS is already "at the mercy" of WMF. The TS does not make the data any free-er.
Best, Dschwen
I think I'd add "general direction of centralizing everything under a single Wikimedia Foundation is a bad idea" as a permanent blocker. Maybe there's a reasonable case for why deprecating the Toolserver and creating Wikimedia Labs is a great idea, but I don't see it yet.
I don't see why each (Wikimedia) chapter shouldn't have its own replica of the databases. We want free content to be free (and re-used and re-mixed and whatever else). If you're going to invest in infrastructure, I think it makes more sense to bolster replication support than try to compete with the Toolserver.