Autosaves are great, but only when they happen FREQUENTLY, otherwise a death will mean recapping HOURS of gameplay. Case in point is Mass Effect 1, it had an autosave system based on checkpoints, NOT THAT YOU'D KNOW THAT because it only ever autosaved at the BEGINNING or maybe one other spot of every planet and a lot of planets in Mass Effect take a couple hours to play through. At least there's manual saves (and on PC, quicksaves) to make up for this horrible oversight. That's better than I can say for BioShock Infinite, which ONLY autosaves, and apparently only when you enter and exit an area through a door. I've barely touched BioShock Infinite because of this, the inability to manual or quicksave, though I suppose you could figure out how to exploit its autosave system to manually save by walking through area doors just to save. Point is, the more saving options, the better, if you really want to limit saving options, do it through an extra hardcore difficulty mode, like XCOM: Enemy Unknown or Temple of Elemental Evil's Ironman mode.
I agree that Bioshock Infinite would have been a lot better with manual save options, but I didn't find it that bad in practice. You never seemed to be more than 10 minutes from a save, unless it was a long combat section, when I wouldn't expect to be able to save anyway.
I think I mostly have a problem with it because I just recently got the game and was really exploring everything I could in the early area, so when I needed to save and quit after 30 minutes of exploring this one area, talking to everybody I just couldn't, and it pissed me right off, because I'd have to do it all again when I fire the game back up.
This of course assumes there's ONLY an autosave option for the game (unless you switch it off).
A good many game have manual, auto, and quick saves all available at the same time.