For me the point of 50: Realization of your Character's Base Potential.
I say base potential because it only takes into account the fact you will have all of your powers and enhancement slots at that time. With the exception of badge related enhancements, this is the max you can achieve for the character itself in terms of 'power'.
From this, you are able to use all of your powers to achieve goals/missions. With the advent of Exemplars, you have the ability to go back and experience content you missed by traveling with other folks on their way up to 50. Granted, you are at the mercy of the folks leveling up to have this happen as there is no way to voluntarily delevel to do content passed by on the march to 50. At least at lv50 you have almost the entire content open to you...
The march to 50 so far has been fun for me, but most of it has been solo. I like to progress to see new things, so most of my progression has been done in solo missions or tagging along as an SK to upper level toons. With the advent of 'Issue 2', the bump in mission exp was a godsend. Now the leveling path more closely matches the life cycle of contacts and gives the feeling of accomplishment while removing the boring grind to level up and get new contacts once the old contacts go dry.
My old SG was too stagnant in the way that few really seemed to want to progress to see new content. They had many alts, which is fine if that is what you like to do, but for me I get very tired of battling the same villains over and over with no change within their 'faction'. To them, I dont think getting to 50 is a big deal. They simply seemed to like the variety provided by the class system.
Max level in games so far will mean more as the game matures. As it matures, more of the player population will hit this cap. As a result, more content will be developed around it. As more focus toward more content for the high level game is made, the push to get to max level will be enhanced. Note that the path to get there will not be entirely ignored, it just lessens in importance. Do some research on expansions for MMOGs out there today that deal with levels and you will see that a majority of the content released is focused on the top 20% of the max level. (Lost Dungeons of Norrath possibly being the exception save for the fact that raiding there still was for the highend game.)
