Some people are interested in the rising price, some people are interested in the interesting things that can be built with and/or on top of it, and some people are interested in some other aspect of the technology that has sprung up around it.

Before you get too gleeful though, I would wager only a small percentage of people who have ever bought Bitcoins have sustained a loss as of today. Besides, there's nothing wrong with putting money behind a technology and then reaping either a gain or a loss based on how successful it becomes.

My actual point was that you can't look at what the fee structure / usability / etc is today and conclude there's nothing useful there.

This is especially true with the more common argument of, "Sure, I can see why someone would find it mildly useful for use a, b, or c; but I don't think it's useful today for more mainstream purpose x, y, or z, so I think it's worthless." Especially when (so far) the abc list keeps growing and the xyz list keeps shrinking. I'm not sure where that trajectory ends, but I personally think there's a lot of interesting problems that will be solved with crypto-currency.

I think his point was more "Most people aren't using Bitcoin because it doesn't provide enough value (utility) and there's not a lot of services built around it (yet)" The get rich quick folks you talk about probably do view that as enough utility to overcome the current barriers to use and thus aren't being burned and punished.