Furthermore, you might have made the same argument about "email" years ago… and thankfully that happened or else we might be asking each other for our "AOLs, Prodigies and Compuserves" and we all know how relevant those "household" names are today.

The point is, we need to call these special URL-based identifiers something, because NOT ALL URLs are OpenIDs. If I asked you for your blog address to sign in, not all blog addresses are OpenIDs; sure I can ask you for your AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, MySpace and other accounts — but one, that doesn't reflect the decentralized model of the web and two, is a list that EVERYONE is going to want to get on (and will probably use dirty tricks, as you suggested).

As much as I don't want OpenID's inner workings to be seen by people, I think in order to enable the decentralization that's necessary for the protocol to thrive, we need to get people in the position where they can recite at least ONE OpenID-capable identifier (which will hopefully soon include email-formatted identifiers).