Over-advertising is what's wrong with online advertising. That doesn't make adsense lame, or even 'built for adsense' sites all that bad. Something should be said for people taking the time to build a site full of original content that ranks well in the search engines. If the ads are relevant, and not all over the place than it's fine. The ESPN site was a good example of over-advertising.
I am excited to see the other articles after this one that show sites who use advertising well, and ways to keep advertising unobtrusive.