Seems completely useless to me. Apple has lost it's focus. I'm thinking of switching to Android for the first time since iPhone 3G. The only reason I'm still on iOS is for iMessage/Facetime.
I feel that Apple knows exactly what it's doing with this feature. There is a strong pull with iMessage for 15-25 year olds in schools, the kind of market something like this will go over pretty well with and potentially create more lock in to their message platform. Along with all the other photo apps that will take advantage of this tech. You could even just look at the Animoji as a tech preview for all the other devs.
it may be useless to you ... but like, do you know any "regular" people? do you know how popular things like bitmoji are? and snapchat face 'filters'? This is gonna kill ;)
Will it kill in the first iteration though? I know tons of people who have snapchat and speak in emoji, but they are all using 5 year old iPhones or budget androids.
Because they are 10-25.