How can one get excited about an iPhone image of a check?

As part of my job, I am regularly exposed to great innovations in the mobile banking domain. Recently, when I read about the USAA iPhone application (Read here and many, many more places), I first thought someone was pulling my leg. In short, USAA (a relatively small US bank catering for the military) will be launching a service where one can take a photo of a check and send it to the bank for processing. I soon realised that many people (predominantly from first world countries) actually thought this was cool and great progress in mobile banking technology.

This reaction for me is a clear indication that mobile banking is way behind in the US compared to most other countries. Many things about this application is strange.

• The iPhone is a great phone, but most people will agree that the camera technology is probably the worst on the market. The business process for fuzzy checks will be interesting.
• It is doubtful that people with checks would want to use a phone to bank the checks. Typically most of these people would have access to a PC. The user experience on a PC would be much easier to manage than utilising a phone.
  
• Risk and fraud management will be particularly difficult
• Future extension to this application (to ultimately turn this into a real mobile banking solution) will be difficult, architecturally.
  

I suppose these kind of applications will be developed in a country with a large part of the payment economy still based on checks. But it does say something about the state-of-the-art of the technology.