The maglev - conventional rail debate

Have you noticed that as you grow older and wiser, you start to see problems in the logic of politicians and the media when they discuss important issues? Alan James of UK Ultraspeed is categoric that the German transrapid system will deliver advantages in virtually every area over conventional rail for high-speed lines yet for some reason, there are still people who are unconvinced. Of course, anyone can understand the risk of a wholesale change in something so large and important but I want to return to my initial point.
I have read various articles about why people legitimately think maglev is not to be preferred over conventional rail and here is where the problems are. Firstly, people compare the UK to Japan. In many ways we have similar issues, similar population densities and a love of trains except for one important detail: Japan has earthquakes and their maglev trains need a much greater distance between train and guideway in order to avoid serious damage in the event of an earthquake, generating strong magnetic fields over these great distances takes an enormous amount of power. Or the media compare the UK to China. Sure, China have an actual maglex system running every day and this is useful to prove it is technically workable but the Chinese system does not run into the centre of Shanghai (an irrelevance at best) and also the whole society in China is different, its economics are different, communism and state ownership dictate low costs to the public which makes it seem like a financial disaster. Again, ticket pricing could be calculated on running costs to recoup the outlay in, say, 10 years and this can be considered at the planning stage.
At the end of the day, I still cannot see any reasons, other than the practical concerns of building guideways or their aesthetics, to say that conventional rail is in anyway better. As I read before, it is like the Canal owners telling everyone that these new fangled trains would move so fast they would melt your eyeballs.
Technology has moved on, its a shame we can't.