I think most of what you just said can be boiled down to the "store-of-value" function of money.  Fiat money is busy dying and taking everybody's hard earned value with it.  Governments simply cannot be trusted around money.  That's why they so tenaciously try to ensure that anything to do with money flows through their system.  Commodities can serve as a store of value, but their physical presence attracts predators.  Plus, they are hard to preserve, appraise, and move around.

Bitcoins so neatly solves all these problems and I predict its greatest use, or at least its initial "killer app" is going to be as a store of value.  Anybody who buys into this is going to _expect_ that their stash retains at least the purchasing power of the fiat they traded.  Maybe that's wishful thinking, but that's common psychology nonetheless.  No matter what happens to the BTC ecosystem, unless it's 100% eradicated, the holders of the BTC will bring the system back to life, in order to recover their value.  You'd need a world-wide prison planet to snuff this.  Sure, that's the ambition of many politicos, but that's not going to happen.  And with BTC in our arsenals it's now a bit less likely than before.