Well, only one of my friends owns MW2 and even he said not to buy the bloody thing, so I cant empathize with you on that one. Try organizing a MP session where everyone will shoot only him, or smacking him in the face with "hardened" edition of MW2, or getting him hooked on Minecraft or Peggle, or destroying his 360 and forcing him to play I wanna be the guy (although that might make leave gaming altogether), or just accepting him despite his faults

.
I didn't buy WaW and MW2 for number of reasons. Multiplayer was meh, lack of dedicated servers, ridiculous pricing policy; like game disc was made of solid gold and therefore everyone needed to pay extra $10 (or $20 where I live), total disregard for PC fanbase, etc. I was also shocked to see that gameplay was somewhat better on consoles (in singleplayer ofc, cause no one in their right mind play would play MP with controller when there's perfectly good mouse and keyboard). But since I skipped those two, I'm seriously considering buying Black Ops in near future cause i miss whole CoD MP a little bit.
Also IGN are a bunch of CoD fanboys so if they say story is lacking it must be true, although I don't see how can anything they say be relevant since they tend to be a bit sarcastic and snidey about games.