With the evil, inferior, (soon to be destroyed by Bitcoin?) CHASE bank, I can transfer an unlimited dollar amount between my own bank accounts for free.
So? You can do that with Bitcoin-Qt too. Create multiple accounts (not to be confused with addresses) and you can transfer as many bitcoins from one to other as often as you like for free. The reason it's free is that in neither case are you creating an actual transaction. This may come as a surprise to you, but CHASE does not, in fact, initiate a wire transfer when you transfer your money from one of your own accounts to another. Why would they? You're not actually moving your money anywhere. But that's not what you're doing here. What you're doing is the equivalent of transferring money from your CHASE account to another account at another bank. It doesn't matter that you own both accounts, you still have to pay the usual fee.
And I fund my Ally account easily with my Chase or Bank of America account. I can easily fund my eTrade money market account through any of my bank accounts for free. Look, no one's trying to say fiat is better or whatever, and we're all Bitcoin fans here, but the fact is in its current state, Bitcoin is just not as consumer friendly as it should be. You're right, we shouldn't expect all these good things for free, but at the same time, when you can I can painlessly transfer my friends money using Paypal or and expect to cash out just as painlessly, I don't think it's unfair to expect the same for the Bitcoin network considering we're spending all our time sunshine pumping it to all our friends.
Just because you don't see the costs associated with your bank transactions, doesn't mean they're not there. Most banks charge a periodic account-fee for example. Additionally, banks use fractional reserves to lend out most of your money, sometimes to shady investments that go belly up and either cause you to lose your deposit or for the government to bail the bank out with tax-money.
Either way, these services cost money and you pay the money. Either through direct payments per transaction, a periodic fee or simply the fact that your money isn't fully secured.
Bitcoin at least is transparant in its price. You pay a small fee for a regular transaction and that's it. There's no monthly account fee and any coins in your wallet are truely yours.