You mean why it matters that we have leap seconds (it doesn't and they should be abolished) or why the news of it matters (because a 1000 crappy time implementations are going to walk off the end of buffers and do weird things) ?
Really it doesn't - people just have this attachment to days and the sun for telling the time.
The only people that a leap second realistically affects are astronomers and they are more than capable of managing their own time software.
At roughly 1 second every 1.5 - 2 years it will be a couple of millenia before the sun even gets an hour away from local noon - and people manage with daylight savings time.
So every 2000years we might need to introduce a leap hour.
It's even worse than that, because solar noon is already different from local noon almost always, almost everywhere.
First, you have to be precisely in the middle of a timezone, and not one of those weird timezones that doesn't actually follow the lines of longitude, either. Otherwise you're skewed late or early relative to solar time. Secondly, solar noon even at the precise center of timezones is only local 12:00 on average, because the timing of solar noon vis-a-vis a 24-hour clock fluctuates through the year by up to 18 minutes. Two factors are involved: the Earth's orbit is slightly eccentric, and Earth's axis of rotation isn't precisely perpendicular to the plane of its orbit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time has details and a graph).
So all the leap seconds do is keep the average local noon, at precise centers of timezones, equal to solar noon.
