Thanks for this thread, I completely agree with you. Storing Bitcoins with a third party is not storing Bitcoins. Its only trusting that the third party stores them for you.
"Hey, have you heard of this new p2p currency? Noone can seize any funds or revert transactions!
You should buy some and if youre too lazy to actually handle them, just store them on a shady e-wallet site."
Storing your wallet in a safe way (both against theft and loss) is not exactly easy nor user friendly at the moment. Even for the tech-savy it's hard. Please contribute to solving this problem instead of kicking dead horses...
I think it would have been clever to ask/pay someone to create an actually secure wallet for them, or even put up some bounties for easier solutions or whatever. We are not talking about negligible sums here, I have heard a figure of 25k BTC on NPR with regard to what Bruce Wagner had stored their.
PS: I store considerable funds at MtGox, but they have real identities who I trust attached to them, and I feel comfortable with the security measure in form of a Yubikey.