When there traffic starts to dip, and they decide to cut google reader completely. There will be no one left who cares. They will think that no one cared in the first place. They will have forgotten when the destroyed reader for a large number of people.
Reader is a natural complement to Plus. It's a huge source of link-sharing, which is probably why they wanted to integrate it, so all of that link traffic would populate their new social product.
I think we're at the early stage of Google's now fairly routine product release cycle: half-baked. They will quickly iterate, taking user feedback into account, until the product is awesome. I point to Gmail's recent redesign as evidence.
I also think that publicly subscribable[0] circles have to be coming soon. I think there's a lot of private sharing that's happening now that doesn't necessarily need to be. Right now private sharing is conflated with directed sharing. With public, but directed sharing, though, you can publicly mine the data, and also use the usage numbers for marketing purposes.
Honestly, I'm still holding out hope that Reader will eventually be a full-fledged alternative interface for Plus.
[0]: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/12261287667/in-defense-of-the...
Perhaps the google '+1' extension is going to be the way they drive that same information into the google+ ecosystem.
I personally think it would have been smarter to integrate google plus with reader more (even if that involves forking reader) before changing the product and removing sharing.
Now we are stuck with an unusable product for an indeterminate amount of time. Due to Google's notoriously poor communication, most won't wait and the community will move elsewhere.
It seems like a waste to me and I seriously doubt they had the foresight to predict this level of backlash.
I guess we will have to wait an see.