mobile - Should users be forced into a responsive design (without the ability to opt out)?

There is nothing worse than getting automatically redirected to a mobile version of a site, and not having (or not easily finding) a "view normal site" link. It's not just that the mobile site is a scaled down version of the normal site, it's the unfamiliarity - the sudden 1-dimensionality of what used to be a 2-dimensional page and the obscene amount of scrolling required. The previous mental map of the site is no longer accurate.

On the Boston Globe site (the oft-cited shining example of responsive design), I find the amount of scrolling to be extremely painful if I am not looking to read in a linear fashion. With the retina display on an iPhone, the desktop version would be discernible and immediately navigable with a quick tap-zoom to any location of the page. As with most responsive designs, the "view normal site" option is not available.

Should users be forced into a responsive design? Should they be able to toggle if off to "view normal site"?

Below are the estimated viewport overlays of an iPhone on the Boston Globe site at each view:

=== Update 2012-09-12 ===

Some prototypes have emerged recently:

Answer

Yes, you should allow users to escape it.

The Boston Globe redesign was handled by Ethan Marcotte, who wrote the book on responsive design. Combined with the CMS nature of the site makes it perfect for deployability, usability, and flexibility concerns with responsive designs.

Each viewport has to morph content to promote, demote, and generally rearrange content. If you design (and test) it correctly, you could meet the needs of the majority of your users. For everyone else, I'd suggest breaking out of the media queries to a larger one (somewhere between min-width: 1000px and 1200px). To not enable this option is to assume that you're offering everything that your normal site has in a smaller format, and in most responsive designs, that really isn't the case.

For desktop users visiting on mobile, they are absolutely locked into the viewport with no recourse; this can be inherently frustrating for some users. There may be other issues like newer devices that are displaying the wrong viewport or generally haven't been covered by media queries, making the design suboptimal - in that case, fall back to the native device's rendering of the page.

Edit (8/13/2012)

I spoke with Ethan about this issue, and I think we agreed. Good responsive designs shouldn't trim features or content from the "desktop" viewport. With the introduction of frameworks such as Bootstrap, I think the issue we're seeing is very poorly done responsive sites that hide certain functionality (such as nav menus) because the designers/developers haven't approached responsive design in the ideal way.

In addition, new devices, browsers, and even PPI/high resolutions may render a responsive website in weird ways. These instances should be rare, as the best responsive sites are not designed for devices/breakpoints but rather ANY canvas, but allowing users to break out to 960px or so is a good fallback.