> Security aficionados pushing non-recoverable traps on people are plain disconnected from reality.

To be fair, if you inadvertently get locked out of your Google account "tough luck, should have used a different provider" and Gmail is a household name so ...

Less snarky, I think that there's absolutely nothing wrong with key escrow (either as a recovery avenue or otherwise) so long as it's opt in and the tradeoffs are made abundantly clear up front. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the route MS went.