A third way of looking at it...
...would be to say that pilots are in fact absolutely essential and whatsmore they should be up there with the aircraft and not many miles away on the ground. I'm willing to bet that if this had been a manned aircraft then, even in the unlikely event of the pilot unwittingly switching off the fuel supply, the sudden silence of the engine cutting out, followed by the cows getting rapidly larger would have tipped him off that something was awry. Furthermore, I would also suggest that armed with this awareness the pilot would be much better placed to diagnose and fix the problem before he and his craft were smeared across the countryside (and incidentally, from the photos of the crash scene it looks like the Reaper in question ended up remarkably intact, considering it could have come down from anywhere up to 40k ft).
Don't get me wrong, UAVs (and UCAVs for that matter) are very useful things, and their safe operation in civilian airspace is inevitable, but it is far too early to go writing off human pilots.