I see the point of this but I'm still weary of centralising a P2P solution. I think firstbits and btc.co are both valid ideas to resolve this.

I guess my main concern would be to make sure that we still have the option to use all and either way for payments. If we were to do something along the lines of alice^mtgox.com as mentioned above I would prefer something along the lines of OpenID instead of a specific retailer. An OpenID-type implementation that allowed me to create aliases bound to different base58 address.

Having said all of the above we can see that QR codes are becoming more common both in desktop as well as mobile wallets. I truly believe QR or maybe other types of barcodes will prove to be the solution in the long term, since they are designed to be easy and fast to read by a machine and can be read even if the resolution is bad or small parts have been damaged.