Magneto is a character that can never seem to remain consistent. He vasilates between two different outlooks: evil, tyranical would-be king and angry, misunderstood mutant liberator. Lately he's being portrayed more as the former ever since the Joseph ordeal when the head honchos at Marvel apparently wanted to "put teeth" back in Magneto. It's not that one of those portrayals is inheirently better than the other, the character is dynamic enough and more importantly his presence is commanding enough that he can go either way. The bigger issue is consistency.
By far, the more intriguing route to go is with him as the liberator, which in a way is quite a shame because it robs the X-Men of a great villian. Still, the feeling I always got was that Professor Xavier was the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Magneto's Malcom X. Like Malcolm X, all Magneto has known has been prejudice, hatred and fear. The greater point is that both Malcolm X and Dr. King had valid ponts, it was more a matter of your particular point of view of the world.
Magneto grew up in Nazi Germany where he lost his family and later in his life, his wife was taken from him; both events gave him plenty of good reason to be distrustful. Fool me twice, shame on you. Fool me three times, shame on me. At this point all he really wants to do is to seperate the mutant world from the humans, whether that be in Genosha or Asteroid M. Much as some of the militant civil rights groups of the 60's, he is willing to use the ends to justify his means.
But much as Malcolm X changed during his Hajj, Magneto had to have a revelation that in fighting racism, he had become a racist. His attempts to seperate were only excaserbating things. Chris Claremont played with this idea in Uncanny X-Men 200 where Magneto takes over the X-Men. If I may be allowed a quick aside, I always enjoyed Claremont's take on Magneto, it seemed like he got the character pretty well. Even the way that he returned Magneto to being a villian much later with the new X-Men book that he launched with Jim Lee was very believeable and didn't sacrifice any of the character.
Back on topic, the problem with Magneto's conversion is where do you go from there? Malcolm X was assassinated, some of his own followers and allies having felt betrayed by him. So unless the writer planned to kill Magneto off, the parallels would have to stop there. What's interesting is when Magneto joined the X-Men, the Brotherhood was left to their own devices and, unlike Magneto, not all of their motives were pure. Without him being there to guide them and keep an eye on things, then they'd run unabated, performing terrorist acts in his name. He'd find himself the poster child for a cause he no longer believed in. How does it feel when you see a church burned to the ground in your name? It'd be tragic, that no matter what good deed you did, only the bad would be remembered.
There are logical repercussions to the life that he'd chosen, the only thing is that the writers and editors would have to commit to portraying the character in a particular light.
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