I'm glad he's dead. I don't think he was a pawn. I think he was a very effective mouthpiece and director of a larger problem, which we (the US) obviously conspired to create through bad foreign policy.
I would think, on a long-term basis, a great many of the younger folk who may get sucked into the fervor of Islamic radicalism, may instead slowly get swayed into the westernization of the region. The commoners are no different than us, they want cell phones and X-box. In other words, peace. And peace is one step closer, in the absence of active ground forces and collateral damage, which is the fuel to keep them radicalized.
Now, maybe the Jolly Green Giant can get a little more jolly, and a little less giant. That'd be good for everybody.
This is not a fix-all. But it's one less bullet-point (and a big one) in the big list of shit we've vowed to "fix".
The big concern is, what may still be "in the pipeline" that they can slap BinLaden's name on, in the road to martyrdom. Hopefully, a lot of this shit can just fizzle and die in a fractured chain of command. We don't know how many of their soldiers are encouraged through poverty and coercion, in a closed circuit, where you may be killed for being neutral.
Under a strong authority, the authority says "we will fight until the last man." and the last man says "What?"