You're right about the centralization of the miners, this is especially true in China, but it's very important to note that miners and nodes do very different things. Miners organize transactions into a block and get rewarded when they create a new hash. Nodes are responsible for verifying the validity of actual transactions. The more nodes that exist means a more decentralized blockchain, and faster transaction times.
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From what I gather Satoshi's dream didn't foresee the split between miner and node. Mining was the incentive to run the node and now running a node actually takes quite a lot of resources and soooo much time to catch up to the blockchain and no real incentive other than maybe trying to anonymize transactions through TOR yourself without trusting a web wallet service. I like that Dash incentives nodes I wish I could afford one of those fancy Baikals to mine Dash with.