And the most important feature:
The network can detect which miners don't take part in block generation and act accordingly.
CIYAM's opinion yesterday on this was something like "only penalize bigger accounts".
If somebody is not forging, then "penalizing" him for not forging by preventing him from forging for a while is not really much of a penalty. After all, they werent forging in the first place.
What this does however is if Evil Bob is monkeying with the forging process and SHOULD have forged, but intentionally didnt so he can try to game the protocol, THEN he gets justly punished.
Maybe it is just a matter of perception. We can just say that if you stop forging for any length of time, it just takes a bit of time to start forging again. Kind of like if you stop your car, it takes time for it to get back to full speed. Your average driving speed is penalized, but then again you had parked your car!
James