The difference with bitcoin is that the protection is up to you. Same as with holding cash or precious metal in a safe at home. Except with bitcoin, you have m-of-n signatures, encrypted wallets, brain-wallets even. You can backup your encrypted wallet anywhere. Someone even put their wallet.dat on a website for anyone to download, but their passphrase is probably 1,000 random characters or something.
Why would anyone want that? Most people are not interested in holding cash or precious metal in a safe at their house. It's extremely inconvenient, expensive to do correctly, and still much riskier than keeping your money in an FDIC-insured bank.
This is the problem with bitcoin: Everything its advocates claim is a desirable feature is actually a huge bug for normal people.
