What about multiple keys (a la LUKS)? Granted, it will be slightly less secure, but you could burn an emergency recovery key under an obfuscated filename on a disc and hide it / give it to your wife. Or, cut the key in half and tell each half to two relatives who never talk to each other... Tattoo the last syllable on your private parts.

On the other hand, I agree that false sense of security is more dangerous than trojans for inexperienced users. They will eventually prefer online services, IMO. But since our primary concern seems to be losing of passwords, being able to define multiple keys could help, and it shouldn't be too hard to implement on top of currently proposed encryption scheme.