1. Small blogs/sites can't make any money with it: If you have a small blog or website (say one the brings in a few hundred visitors or less per day), you are probably not going to make any money using Adsense. First off, the click through rates per visitor (the number of times a person visiting your site clicks an ad) are generally quite small and the amount of money you get per click is usually less than a dollar. Combined with the 100$ payout threshold for you to get your checks and a propensity for Adsense to declare some (or many) of your clicks invalid, it can take months before you see your first check.
Use instead: I would personally use something like MyLikes or a PayPal donation button instead, especially if I only cared about making a few bucks per month. The payout threshold on MyLikes is a couple of bucks, and the pay per click is usually in the 0.20$ -0.50$ range -- probably good enough to get token amounts every month.
2. Big sites don't need it: As for big blogs and websites, most of them can do much better than Adsense. If you have a large site (thousands of visitors per day), Adsense is not a good alternative unless you really don't have the time to find anything better. Most of the ads that pop up on Adsense tend to be not well targeted to your specific niche, and the payouts and pay-per-click rates are below what you could negotiate with a private party.
Use instead: With a large site, it's much better to sell space on your site to specific advertisers. It takes a lot more work, but it's also probably much cheaper and more cost effective than just throwing your ads out shotgun style, like you would with Adsense.
3. Lazy advertising: Advertisers also should probably not use Adsense because, in most cases, it's just lazy advertising on their parts. Think about it: if you're going to spend thousands of dollars on an advertising campaign for your product, wouldn't you much rather have control over where your ads show up instead of leaving it to a third party that doesn't care if your business exists in two years?
Use instead: In most cases, it is better for advertisers that are serious about getting their name out to negotiate directly with websites/blogs that match their niche. Often, the resulting ads are much more targeted and productive than Adsense ads.
So, even though Adsense may be a good tool in some limited cases, it's also a good idea to avoid it in others.
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