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The GM may use the Critical Spell Failure Table or improvise some other “backfire” he finds amusing.
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Thats what Magic says. Way I see it, this doesn't say you have to use the crit fail table, it's just there as suggestions for the kind of outcomes a crit fail entails. To me this says if someone has house-ruled some other crit-fail table, thats fine, so long as they are all bad results.
Personally I somewhat agree with Fred. Unless its just a piddly little demon that pops up(a foot tall gremlin or something) it's too bad a result for a small energy spell. Especially given that the amount of bad stuff for a lot of other results on the table scales directly to the power of the spell(usually in the results that switch targets.)
All that being said, seems to me, even if you kept in the summoning a demon thing, thats why you pay your Magicians Insurance and do all your pot-shaping inside a Pentagram ceremonially cast by your local Magicians Insurance chapter. And if you do get a demon, he can only screw up whats inside the Pentagram, and you send a runner off to the local MI chapter to bring their extermination team by. If it's a reliable result that if I cast x spell 50,000 times, I will summon a demon a certain amount of times, human ingenuity will find a way to prepare for the demon summoning, if there is a way. Your town government would require licensed Magicians to have up to date Magicians Insurance before they can set up shop in town. Which doesn't prevent fly-by-night outfits from operating without it to cut costs and accidentally summoning demons to wreak havoc.
Somewhere in this thread someone seemed to be implying that a magician potter is a selfish mean person for putting other potters out of business. I feel that a magician using magic to make pots faster than a mundane person isn't morally questionable and needs to be punished for their greed any more than a farmer using a horse to plow a field as opposed to digging furrows himself is a selfish tool that needs to be punished. It's technology, and its a capitalist system. Those who can produce the best product the fastest for the lowest price deserve to be more successful, and those who can't compete with that should find a different line of work, IMO.
Does this make it so that magicians would dominate society? To some extent, yes. I'm okay with that. It makes logical sense to me. Whether or not this would be accurate to Yrth as a setting is up for debate. But I think any system that defines Magic as being able to do X and Y, but not Z, essentially becomes technology, because it gives repeatable results. And people will take advantage of that to become rich/successful/happy/powerful, because thats what people have been doing with technological innovations for millenia.