There's a big difference between the security of exit nodes (which see all the traffic passing through them in the form in which it travels over the Internet) a

There's a big difference between the security of exit nodes (which see all the traffic passing through them in the form in which it travels over the Internet) and using .onion addresses, where the intermediate hosts don't see any of the data unencrypted. To my mind, accessing the general Internet is not what you want to do with TOR -- ideally the service you want to access will also be on .onion, allowing you to avoid exit nodes. In practice, that's not going to be possible in all cases so exit nodes are a necessary evil requiring extra care.