You must not forget that many distros moved to systemd out of necessity rather than desire, and for some (Debian) the decision was lengthy, splitting and controversial.
EDIT: By "necessity", I mean things such as GNOME (which is a very often used graphical shell in a majority of distributions) and udev (which is getting integrated into systemd, is used by most distros, and, bar Busybox's mdev or Gentoo's eudev fork, has no alternative) depending or planning to depend on systemd.
Also, before anyone points to previous messages saying that udev will continue to be usable without systemd, they're out of date. Lennart Poettering currently intends to make systemd a requirement to use udev and expects applications to use the new systemd-only way of calling into udev directly, so that distros can't even fork udev or use an older version to get around the issue. See http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTczNjI
And he even knows it : "I guess in a way with the energy we are pushing the changes we propose with we are calling for opposition"
On one hand, personal and death threats are way out of line. On the other hand, he kinda rip what he sow. He could have done the same post without mentioning Linus and Gentoo for instance. When you put so much "energy" to push for a key component, don't be surprise by the push back. Especially if you're not willing to compromise. Yes, it can get out of hand, but that doesn't mean the push back has no ground.
EDIT: By "necessity", I mean things such as GNOME (which is a very often used graphical shell in a majority of distributions) and udev (which is getting integrated into systemd, is used by most distros, and, bar Busybox's mdev or Gentoo's eudev fork, has no alternative) depending or planning to depend on systemd.