Bob,
I don't know if I agree with your position:
Equipment grounds can also fail, but I think most would agree with Toms position that they are far less likely to fail than a GFCI, which isn't even guaranteed to work right out of the box, let alone ten years from the installation time.
It seems like it'd be almost impossible to remove the potential for a L-G shock: Even if all strong paths to ground were removed [metal pipes, equipment grounds], if there is still enough conduction to trip a GFCI, then there is still enough current flow to shock someone. And the severity of that shock would increase the closer someone got to the grounding point for the service equipment.
It just seems kinda uncertain.
-John
