Agreed. Ethereum, has a role as a platform and is incredibly useful for all types of things. There are definitely projects that are interesting and could potentially be very useful. 

The minting of coins, however, and the sale of ico's are very clearly securities. 

They are premined and then marketed to the public for the purpose of raising Capital for the company. 

If you want to call them collectors items, then I guess there's a discussion there. Short of that, by definition, they're already illegal.