I hear you, I've also heard "How can we get our velocity higher?" more times than I can count.

What I don't like about velocity is that it encourages the gamification of the process. Developers start caring more about their velocity than the quality of their code and before long nobody has any clue of the big picture and the project starts going down the drain.

Working in the video game industry, I see the striking difference between playing games and developing games first hand, every day :)