Actually, updating Firmata is on my to-do list... roughly in the middle, below lots of urgent stuff for Teensy 3.0, but well above lots of low priority bugs and stuff. I'm planning to add Due and Teensy 3.0 definitions, and also work on making it truly compatible with alternate Stream-based ports. I want to merge the recent stepper support that's currently in a separate branch.
This probably won't happen in time for 1.0.2 (unless someone else does it... which seems unlikely). At the moment, I have 2 Dues on order from Mouser, but they haven't arrived yet. The only Due hardware I have is the early developer beta. If Mouser doesn't ship in a couple weeks, I'll probably just use the beta hardware for testing. I'll probably only connect a few LEDs and pushbuttons. If anyone is willing to test with more stuff connected to lots of pins, please get on the Firmata developer mail list.
As to whether Firmata is a "waste" of good hardware, if it lets people get their projects working, then I believe it's valuable.