I don't understand the "but it isn't the game as it was programmed" argument against this. Quake III Arena is usually played competitively with the Challenge ProMode Arena mod, which rebalances weapons, adds air control, etc. (Actually, that may not be the best example, considering the severity of the modifications, which might be enough to consider it an essentially different game.)
I mean, say somebody comes up with a boardgame, and it's really good. And aside from a few of the pieces having abilities that rely on die rolls, and which everyone agrees are fair, everything is under the control of the players. Except that every turn, you roll a one-hundred-sided die, and if you roll a one, you skip your turn.
Nobody would be crazy for suggesting that this rule be removed. If the game is truly great, and destined to be played hundreds of millions of times, someone is going to skip their turn twice in a row. Three times. Four. If you were playing the game just to screw around, it wouldn't be a problem. But if you were playing for the love of competition, for the fire that burns in your heart as you match wits with another being, and you were denied the opportunity to move four times? (A 1/100^4 chance, I believe. Not insignificant, compared to the number of turns of this game that are going to be played over the course of years.) You'd demand a rematch, almost certainly, and your opponent would be troubled - without accepting, they could never be sure they were actually more skillful, and not just luckier.
But in a tournament setting, their victory would stand.
Almost any sensible tournament ruleset would remove this rule. It's silly to leave in a comparable rule in Brawl, just because that's not the way the game shipped to us. It's OUR game now, and we change it however we **** well want.
Now, I'm not entirely convinced it should be taken out. Logistically, we would need a way to verify that everyone is using the same hack, and that that change causes as few extraneous changes as possible.
Also, it's possible that techniques will be developed to avoid tripping, or to cause it intentionally (if anyone can find a use for it), and that these might imply more depth than a game without it would have. But as it stands now, I'd rather be rid of the one-in-a-hundred-dashes tripping, given that it serves no useful function other than to insist that the game be played in the air, which seems arbitrarily limiting.