The idea is kinda similar to firstbits (if you haven't seen, look it up - it's pretty neat), but the CRC part is a clear advantage. Firstbits pretty much died off and I think it happened because of errors in calculating firstbit addresses by a popular service (blockchain.info) which resulted in some loss of funds.
However, I suppose the fact that you have to get a transaction in the blockchain before you can use an address, as well as the implied mandatory address reuse, could be a killer
Firstbits looks like an interesting idea. This format fixes most of the problems, but even with a checksum I think the two problems you mentioned here are a killer.