I agree with most of the comments that this article misses the point of bitcoins, and invests a bit too much faith in fiat money and the governments that back them. Some of us are concerned about the direction of the US government (domestic drones and hit lists anyone?), as well as the oligarchical relationships between the government, corporations and banks. A fair number of financial wizards with a good track record of prediction are pointing out that our economy could seriously tank, taking our fiat currency with it. But even with mild paranoia about the US government, there are governments in the world from which the need is more dire to protect assets. Bitcoin may be one way of relief organizations getting money in and out of such countries in the future. One concrete example from this year: Governments of the world are running scared of the involuntary transparency provided by whistle-blowing sites such as Wikileaks. It took very little time to coordinate with banks and set-up a financial blockade: no donations via traditional bank methods (bank wires, credit cards or even paypal) were able to get through. Wikileaks set up a bitcoin address for donations, and the Oligarchs/Governments/Banks couldn't do anything about it! Cryptocurrencies may be the only way to preserve liberty from encroaching fascism/loss of liberty of various types.
From a practical standpoint, bitcoin can be anonymous, but may not be so by default (google anonymous bitcoin for more info). At this point, I find bitcoins more useful as a means of moving money around, rather than for storage. One example is receiving $L or $OMC and using Virwox to convert the money to bitcoins, which can then be anonymized, and further converted into funds elsewhere (e.g. an anonymous offshore gold account), or given to a deserving organization that is being financially blocked by the governments and banks of the world. Using bitcoins as a virtual currrency would remove one of the steps, but it would need the same protections as Virwox is trying to put in $OMC.
Pirates Atoll is a grid that is being built to facilitate this sort of freedom: http://piratesatoll.com:9000/wifi