Every client has risks. When money is involved, it's important to look at the facts. So far, many more coins have been lost due to the way some things are implemented or poorly understood in the reference client than with Electrum's "reduced security model." In fact, I haven't heard of any Electrum users being robbed or otherwise losing their wallets.
Exactly. I only heard of users losing bitcoins because they didn't regularly backup their wallet, but I haven't yet heard of a single user that would lose bitcoins because they were fed wrong data by the server. Also there's also blockexplorer/blockchain.info to double check for the paranoid. And let's be perfectly honest here, until the satoshi client reduces the time it takes to download the blockchain
considerably, it won't be really user-friendly.