It's for people who need to purchase stuff online, and want to have a more convenient way to use their bitcoins directly, basically.
If you're comfortable with getting verified, then honestly, selling your coins for your local currency on a major exchange would be the "cheapest" or the option with the least amount of spread. But if convenience is a factor, then you can definitely look into bitcoin debit cards such as Wirex.
Since there are quite a number of banks that don't accept inflow of money from cryptocurrency sales, it's not only for convenience, especially, as you said, if you really want to use the card you have to get fully verified.
In my country 2 or 3 exchanges closed their doors in the last 6 months exactly because the banks didn't want to work with them (anymore).