Ron Brownstein makes an interesting point:

But with Republicans operating as a parliamentary party of opposition, Democrats will have to pass health care reform virtually, if not entirely, alone. That leaves them with a binary choice: Democrats can either fragment into stalemate or function as a parliamentary majority party by unifying enough to advance their agenda. The choice would seem straightforward. If one side in a firefight is operating with military cohesion and the other devolves into ragged, undirected units, it’s not hard to predict which will suffer more casualties.

I don’t think this is necessarily bad news in this case. Democrats are likely to be mostly the majority party for the next generation. The extent to which they are able to get around the filibuster-fucking around ineffectuality of typical American governing coalitions and ram stuff through Congress will be the same extent to which they are able to make the United States into a normal first-world country.