In the original article author's defense, I think his argument does scale out properly to large portion of the population, who have no need to print anything more than documents. On the off chance (once a year?) something needs to be printed in high quality paper with colour, I'd jog down to the local Kinkos/Staples instead.

If you print colour-coded diagrams regularly, then the cost-benefit analysis falls apart, but I would argue that you might be a smaller part of the general population than you expect.

I maintain a single Brother household MFC, had it for nearly a decade, changed the toner twice, drum never. We print notes, documents, and legal contracts for work, etc... even the occasional diagram that gets put in the print queue doesn't _need_ to be in colour. It'd certainly be nice, but it's not a dealbreaker either.