It's really funny, isn't it? It's as if everything built on top of it has been given the exact opposite amount of care originally put into the bitcoin concept.
Proof of work? The double-spending problem solved? A distributed P2P ledger? Brilliant! Now please tell me the quickest way I can give money to a stranger to hold them somewhere in the cloud for me...
Shit, they got stolen. Well, I guess the whole point is to keep them on my _own_ machine, so that I'm in control of my own financial destiny. Fuck Bernanke! It's like I keep telling my friend Steve...
Shit, they got stolen. Ooh, shiny physical Bitcoins! See, just read the number right here where it says, "Casascius"-- I mean, "Casacius"-- wait...
This leads me to think the whole thing is an elaborate social experiment. "Satoshi" whoever she/he/they may be, released bitcoin and have just sat back and watched events unfold. If she/he/they were still participating I'd expect to see an ounce of brilliance shining somewhere from the last two years.
I'm sure he's a straight-up guy, but hypothetically what is to stop casascicus storing all the private keys? At any point in the future - tomorrow, five years, thirty years... he could transfer some or all of the value of the unredeemed coins into an address controlled by him. It would take a while - maybe years - for anyone to even notice, you'd have to try and redeem it yourself. And even if you did notice, how could you prove it was him and not someone else who had access to your coin in the intervening time? You couldn't even prove that you hadn't already redeemed it yourself. The whole concept is taking everything that is good and secure about bitcoin and shitting all over it.
That said, great idea for a novelty memento, I'm sure they will sell like hot cakes for that reason alone