Money is transferred around for so many other reasons that retail sales. Trying to hard to push Bitcoin into retail is bound to fail and will only serve to harden the views of those who are suspicious of it’s usefulness. Bitcoin does has some unique advantages:

• International sales
• Customer may wanting anonymity
• Low volume hobby selling were any financial or administrative overhead is unacceptable.
• Selling to people without access to traditional banking such as the children or the very poor.

However all retail is competitive and small percentages can be the difference between win or fail. So with very few exceptions ruling out 99.999(99?)% of potential customers is commercial suicide. Bitcoin will be successful but that will happen in areas that are out of the spotlight such as:

• People sending money to family across borders (I suspect this accounts for the strength of BitomatPLN)
• Paying foreign contractors, especially as it makes daily results based payments feasible.
• Paying international suppliers

As well as these there will be uses we just have not thought of yet. I personally like he idea of forum software with a micro-payments and rewards. You could try to balance it so that normal users broke even, strong community members could earn get some free beer but spammers and trolls would be priced out.

Bitcoin has had quite a bit of main stream coverage of late. One thing that has surprised me is the amount of negativity towards it. If we want bitcoin to be successful then some though into why the natural reaction of so many people is so bad.
I think a large part of this is the thought that early adopters are arrogant, who are they to just think they can magic up this money? It's also suspicion, why should they trust people with such an obvious self interest. No doubt jealousy plays it’s part too.
Then there is lack of understanding. The concepts around how bitcoin works are not intuitive, the problems they solve are not obvious. People fear of looking stupid and resent having spending time understanding something they are suspect to be a scam.
Finally people lack vision and expect too much too soon from this young project. Right now using a clunky (sorry) desktop client to pay someone who only accepts bitcoin for fun or publicity does not seem that revolutionary. Observers may not realise there are still aspects of bitcoin being ironed out, such as tiered services and thinner clients. Anyone taking a quick look and just seeing a snapshot of what bitcoin is now misses the point and wonders what ll the fuss is about. As there is zero barrier to entry things could change extremely quickly. Anyone with a use case, from international shipping to my corner shop could start using bitcoin overnight. I think when those who have dismissed bitcoin look again they will then realise the pace of change and direction this thing is heading.

I say this from some personal experience, I didn’t get bitcoin the first time I heard about it for many of the reasons above. Open-transactions seemed much more solid (the potential for interoperability was lost on me) I actually made a point of not reading bicoin articles as I was convinced it was tosh. I did feel stupid when the penny coin finally dropped.