No one wants a globally distributed ledger. They want to send money from one person to another. Or, to use the example that motivated Vitalik, they want a record of the items they own in a video game. A globally distributed ledger is simply a tool to accomplish that. As long as Ethereum represents a "single core global virtual computer with much less power than a typical Raspberry Pi" (despite the fact that it utilizes an enormous amount of real computers), it is utterly incapable of solving those problems at any sort of scale.

Take Augur, for example. A prediction market without a trusted resolver seems pretty useful, but the fact that a blockchain can't handle any real world application on-chain meant that it was unusable.

Another example is that it's ridiculous on its face that CryptoKitties was able to bring Ethereum to its knees. People want to base real financial markets on this tech when a trading card game is able to congest the network and increase fees 10-fold?