Depends on what you're trying to download. I was sharing 200 DivX-Movies for a couple of days and I received 80,000 Upload Requests within 24 hours but within that time I could not upload more than 2 movies.

Now I'm sharing 5,000 mp3s and I'm receiving about 10% of that number in 24 hours, while I can upload roughly 200.

You can see the difference: divx was 40,000reqs to 1ups, mp3 25reqs to 1ups. It's no problem to download mp3s these days, but downloading divX movies from gnutella is really painful (although I've already done so: I downloaded harry potter within 24 hours using mutella)

Freeloaders and modem users were a problem for gnutella just a year ago, but today modem users are becoming rare and people with fast connections who are on the net 24/7 don't have any reason for freeloading. Even if 20% of the gnutella users were freeloaders or modem users (or both) that would not matter so much.