They are an issue. Transaction fees are paid to the miner who builds the block which contains a transaction - for your transactions to be valid, they must be included in a block, so you'll have to pay the fees. Unless you mine the block yourself and don't require a fee / recollect it - a possibility, but your odds are abysmal.
Transaction fees are intended to be motivation to be a miner. Since 50 bitcoins per mined block will soon become 25 and eventually nothing, transaction fees will progressively take over to become the majority of miners' income. They're not enforced by the protocol, so there may be some transaction-fee-free miners out there at any given time, but they're not likely to be the majority of the compute power (and will probably diminish as time goes on). You might end up waiting for a long time for your transaction to be confirmed.
Transaction fees are intended to be motivation to be a miner. Since 50 bitcoins per mined block will soon become 25 and eventually nothing, transaction fees will progressively take over to become the majority of miners' income. They're not enforced by the protocol, so there may be some transaction-fee-free miners out there at any given time, but they're not likely to be the majority of the compute power (and will probably diminish as time goes on). You might end up waiting for a long time for your transaction to be confirmed.