You know what? A year ago, I would have shared the exact same scepticism.
Now, I have an infant daughter who likes nothing more than being carried around, which has exponentially increased the number of activities I do with one hand, standing up.
Being able to have a soundless controller that you don't need to pick up or fiddle around with in a way that disturbs a tiny human sleeping on your other arm sounds like absolute perfection.
I just went to the leap dev meetup in nyc, (i also dev for leap). My feeling is that its a great UI instrument, for UI focused applications. What do i mean by that? Well, think of museums, aquariums, jobs such as architecture, perhaps autocad. Jobs/tasks where it would be way more fun and efficient to do the action with your hands.
These are things I've come up against in writing apps for it.
If I can lean my elbow on something it's OK. If I have to keep my hands up for very long, not so much fun.
I've been trying to restrict the broader movements to less-common actions (mode changes, for example) and then use simpler, arm-on-table doable actions for other things.
Standing desks would be a nice alternative too. Avoid the chair and have the thing facing upwards instead of forward. You'd have to work out how to keep your body out of the picture (no pun... sorry, I can't lie). Then you're really avoiding compression of any sort of nerves, except maybe in your feet.
D: s'what keyboards, palm rests and elbow rests are for
S: yeah, i hear you
S: i played around with it for about 20 minutes and my arm was aching
So yeah. this is me being skeptical