If your list has more than a dozen items or so, then you need a better way to represent your data (EDIT: just to be clear, not in a data structure way— rather in a graphical representation way. See Tufte's "Envisioning Information" (and Tufte's work in general)).
That being said, the effects are really sweet. Zipper and Fan are my favorites.
Big lists can be useful as reference tables, though in that case I'm not sure I would bother with fancy scrolling. For example, while you can make better visualizations of per-country GDP for various purposes, just the plain sortable table imo is the most useful basic reference format.
It seems to work pretty well for my music library (where I have lists with artists and albums).
That said, I appreciate being able to instantly go to all artists or albums that start with a certain letter, either by pressing a key on the keyboard or by taping on the index on iOS devices.
I’m not sure how things like that can be improved to not make them a list. Search is always a possible alternative, but to me search is a fundamentally different way of looking at my music. If I search I already know what I want, if I scroll through the list I don’t and I’m looking for something.
That being said, the effects are really sweet. Zipper and Fan are my favorites.