Say goodbye to Google Translate, Transliterate & ten other APIs

About a fortnight ago, Google highlighted on its official blog how "two clever Translate trends caught our eye—perhaps one of them will inspire you to come up with a fun Translate trick of your own.". Folks around the world were making fun remixes

First, some creative folks translated strings of consonants into German to create a new beatboxing tool. The phrase “pv zk bschk” didn’t initially make much sense to us, but a quick listen got us nodding our heads along to the beat.
Now it seems there’s a similar trend in Taiwan: using the spoken output of Google Translate as the vocals for self-composed songs or video spoofs.

A few days ago there was an announcement on the Google Code blog that the Google Translate, Transliterate & ten other APIs will be deprecated. The Google Translate API will be shut off completely on December 1, 2011 and the reason is "substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse". So what constitutes "fun Translate tricks" and abuse? Why not just debar developers abusing the API?

An aggrieved developer ranted thus in the comments section of that announcement -

you are supposed to be the smartest guys on the planet and the only solution you can come up is to shut it down? thats a joke, but the joke is on us, the developers.
with this move you just showed us what you really: a company that does not care about developers, you just want to become more like facebook and apple. oh what a great world we live in. more walled gardens.

Also see - HOW TO monitor performance and availability status of public APIs & websites