You don't NEED rooted for Itching Thumb, by the way, although it's recommended. MY OWN experience is that rooting is easy, great and, if you are careful with granting superuser permissions, very much well worth it. The risks are the same as ANY kind of root or admin permissions--either the chance of running a malicious script with root access or your own dumb mistakes causing severe problems. The most important thing, as always, is to be SURE you keep imaged backups of your device in case any of that happens--so you can always revert back to a known working and safe copy.