As a developer I no longer worry about 1% of users who turn off Javascript. It is too time consuming and development time is too expensive to waste on such nonsense. AJAX saves an incredible amount of bandwidth which turns directly into $$$ savings, which makes profits higher. If I lose one or two potential users of the site for every 100 users, those one or two lost users will cost a lot more in development than the potential income of they could ever bring in.
Try turning off Javascript and logging into Facebook, it becomes a very broken website after that. If it's good enough for Facebook, its good enough for me.