They’re taking an opinionated stance on creating a community. That’s generally a good thing, and in order to provide what they believe is a better experience for the kinds of people who interact with each other based on a conventional “real” name, they are willing to forgo that portion of the market that want to use a handle for some or all of their online interaction.

As I tweeted, I have no use for “circles” if I can’t be “raganwald" to those people who know me through my writing and “Reg Braithwaite” to those people who know me face to face, but I have zero problem with choosing not to use Google+, so why should I have a problem with Google choosing not to cater to me?