I think Fedora should look at the CD crisis as an opportunity rather than the need to axe a lot of packages in a hurry. First, the world is moving towards DVD. It's an absolute joy to install Fedora off a DVD, although I've often found that process of downloading an manipulating a disk image that big can be challenging. (BitTorrent anyone?)
My AMD64 has an optical drive that reads and writes every CD and DVD format (other than double-sided) that cost about $100; in the long term, the majority of users are going to enjoy that convenience.