In the meantime, sites like
vekja.net and
www.mybitcoin.com have been experimenting with account-based sites. You create an account on a website and hold your bitcoins on account there and transfer in and out. Creating an account on a website is a lot easier than installing and learning to use software, and a more familiar way of doing it for most people. The only disadvantage is that you have to trust the site, but that's fine for pocket change amounts for micropayments and misc expenses. It's an easy way to get started and if you get larger amounts then you can upgrade to the actual bitcoin software.
Was the creator of bitcoin suggesting that online custodial wallets were a good alternative, especially for smaller amounts?
To me it is not that surprising, while satoshi is without a doubt a legendary figure at the same time he understood very well what bitcoin users may like, so if for example you have a certain amount of bitcoin in a cold wallet that only you control and then you decide to deposit 1% or even 0.1% of those funds in an online wallet to have easy access to them, even if you lose that amount to hackers or to the website itself you are not going to get extremely mad about it since you know most of your funds are secure, so in that case it makes sense to use online wallets as you are managing your risk properly.