In my experience, the bulk of the awesomeness of gigabit Internet is that it turns the Internet into a LAN. I think anybody who uses the Internet in a LAN-like manner can definitely benefit from gigabit speeds (and can I get 10Gbps soon, please? I'm ready!)
For instance, I (regularly) upload my 20~60GB VMWare VM files between my house and the office, because I don't want to carry a computer/disk around with me. At work, I tend to have a bunch of Remote Desktop connection to my home machines, which I leave up 24/7, as its not enough bandwidth to make a perceptible difference. And while most backup services like CrashPlan or Mozy or whatever definitely are the bottleneck, if you are backing up to your own remote servers, or to AWS via something like Arq, the speed really makes a difference, just as much as with a LAN (at least up to 100Mbps with AWS, anyway... at that point I think they become the gating factor).
I agree you don't get a huge benefit when surfing normal Internet websites, and that the benefits break down when the remote end of the connection is international, but for stuff like the above, the faster the better.
For instance, I (regularly) upload my 20~60GB VMWare VM files between my house and the office, because I don't want to carry a computer/disk around with me. At work, I tend to have a bunch of Remote Desktop connection to my home machines, which I leave up 24/7, as its not enough bandwidth to make a perceptible difference. And while most backup services like CrashPlan or Mozy or whatever definitely are the bottleneck, if you are backing up to your own remote servers, or to AWS via something like Arq, the speed really makes a difference, just as much as with a LAN (at least up to 100Mbps with AWS, anyway... at that point I think they become the gating factor).
I agree you don't get a huge benefit when surfing normal Internet websites, and that the benefits break down when the remote end of the connection is international, but for stuff like the above, the faster the better.