One thing that wasn't mentioned yet was that there's not currently a mechanism for replacement.  Locked transactions can be "introduced" into the blockchain fairly easily, and nodes will accept them and hold them in their memory pool (and thus drop conflicting transactions), but they won't forward otherwise-valid replacements, and only miners with custom rules will mine them for you.  If you want to replace a time-locked transaction, you're going to have to mine it yourself, or go find a miner to agree to help you.  Once a replacement is mined (or even just a regular transaction spending one of the inputs), all nodes holding the time-locked tx will see the conflict and drop the one in their memory pool.

So, if you can create the tx, you can get the "time-delay" aspect out of the network right now, but you have to work pretty hard if you use the "replacement" aspect of it.

P.S. - Congrats on being the most well-spoken, research-driven, single-post Newbie I've seen on these forums