While it's a very cool idea, it seems like using these 'smart-contracts' will be more trouble than they're worth in the majority of real world situations. I don't know why this seems to be a use-case of Ethereum that is so readily emphasized.
To me, all of the other use-cases of Etherium are already done better by other technologies that just focus on those. Smart contracts are Etherium's killer app, in the sense that, if you want smart contracts, you need Etherium.
A lot of things seem that way with the internet but it usually turns out that by making it automatable you can replace slow human processes with instant automatic ones..
