once it gains wide acceptance it will be so much easier to transact on day to day basis, cheap transactions to anywhere in the world, micro payments, pay your grocery and gas with your smartphone, etc...
and btw running bitcoin client is not using your cpu/gpu cycles so you won't even have to worry about that.
floating value
the paper money is the shit - what value it has, where the value of it has gone, how much lower will it go? yeah i rather some floating value than devaluing currency