Max Keiser mentioned recently that Mt.Gox is crud because it just matches up buy and sell orders in the order they are added to the queue and that adding a "market maker" would solve the insane price fluctuations.
This recent activity certainly brought several of gox's inadequacies to light for many...including a friend of mine that purchased quite a bit right near the beginning of rapid decline (~240)...bottom line it's dangerous to have any single exchange ultimately have that much influence over the network as a whole. Node distribution concept applied in all aspects of BTC seems to be a good idea in general...from Exchanges to mining, to actual dev. work