Dependent on them to do what, exactly?
Oh, I dunno, teleporting, plane shifting, mind reading, charms/mind-control, hordes of permanent minions, facing ethereal oponents or becoming ethereal themselves.
Umm, the druid can do all of that - granted plane shifting to an Outer Plane does take Shapechange, for the others, aside from the obvious Shapechange stuff:
Teleport - Master Earth, Stormwalk, Word of Recall
Charms/etc - Summoned Pixies do just fine, or Baleful Polymorph + animal charms/mind reading/whatever
Hordes of minions - I don't really consider that something that
needs to be done, whether other people in my party can do it or not. On the other hand, the druid can make his own horde on the spot. Or Initiate of Nature if you really must have extra permanent pets around.
Ethereal - Phantom Stag works wonders
There are things the druid isn't the best at, but that's obviously true of every class on that list.
edit:
See, the wizard/cleric get all of those as default in core. If you add enough splatbooks and optimization, pretty much every class can do everything (there's an option for monks to get UMD out there for Vecna's sake!).
Not to mention the cleric/wizard still do it better. Plain old teleport has much less restrictions than tree stride and friends, you're not limited to just controling elements of nature, you have a much wider array of minions to build/bind/mind-control, etc, etc.
Master Earth ignores teleport-blockers, so I actually like it more than teleport - that aside:
I'm not arguing that they're the best at any of this, but the argument was made that they are
dependent on others to do it for them, and that's simply not true.