Funny, I always thought of it as a near perfect store of value and nothing more.
The fact of the matter is that this is all Bitcoin has been used for so far (no company has used Bitcoins thus far for micropayments) so I think it will continue to evolve into an even more perfect store of value as time goes on.
I'm not sure it's any more resistant to rubber-hose attacks ("What's your private key/passphrase?" vs "Where did you bury your gold stash?"). Perhaps a little more convenient, though.
There is no such thing as a perfect store of value that is nothing else. A store of value must have real value - for use as a material or as a medium of exchange. Otherwise, there is no value to store.
By this logic, any cryptographically strong series of bits is a perfect store of value.
Check out http://bitvisitor.com -- they pay out hourly in > 10^-5 BTC increments (~$0.0012 at current prices). There are totally legitimate reasons to allow micro-transactions.
The fact of the matter is that this is all Bitcoin has been used for so far (no company has used Bitcoins thus far for micropayments) so I think it will continue to evolve into an even more perfect store of value as time goes on.