In practice though yeah the only real selling points are the packaging itself and the fact that you don't have to do a digital download (which would take me approximately half an hour, but I am a douchebag).
Still quite a bit less than the time it would take to get it shipped from Amazon.
And still probably have to patch the fucker.
It sounds like your real issue is the fact that the big box retailers are charging WAY more than the inherent manufacture/distribution/storage overhead, which may or may not be true but is certainly not a very attractive product choice.
Well no, the retailers are charging what Valve is charging; it's just that Amazon has a pretty significant discount going right now.
It's more that, in this case, the physical copy actually REMOVES the inherent value that a physical copy has over a digital one.
That's why most AAA titles come in LOOK AT ALL THIS PHYSICAL BONUS SHIT editions now, which most retailers won't stock anyway because the boxes are too damned big, lol.
Well, and what brick-and-mortar retailers are there anymore, anyway? GameStop is about the last dedicated game store in most markets (and I really miss local mom-and-pop game stores, dammit). Other than that, your choices are just general retailers like Wal-Mart and Target or tech stores like Best Buy. And I'm close to a Fry's, but most people aren't and anyway I still kinda hate Fry's, I just hate it less than most of the alternatives.
Anyway. Presumably your Wal-Marts and Targets don't stock the Ridiculous Giant Special Editions of PC games, and I would guess GameStop only keeps one or two copies on the shelves. Electronics stores like Best Buy and Fry's might carry the Special Editions, and you can certainly get them at Amazon.
Let's just skip to the bit where we declare disc-based media to be as dead as tape and move on.
We're certainly getting there. Especially on PC, though of course the disc as a single-use medium for copying the game to your hard drive has been standard since the late 1980's.
Physical goods have an inherent value over digital ones, but the publishers are deliberately REMOVING that value, so it's hard to see them lasting much longer. Then again, vinyl's coming back; there's always going to be a core group of people who prefer to own things.
Consoles are, of course, much more wedded to physical media for the time being. I assume it's partly a misguided antipiracy strategy, partly general incompetence at digital distribution, and partly the fact that sticking a 2TB hard drive in every console adds up to a significant expense -- but mostly that the console market just suffers from more inertia than the PC market.
iOS, of course, is all over digital game distribution, but it helps when your games aren't DVD-sized. We'll see what happens with the Vita; the problem with the PSPGo was, by all accounts, not so much the lack of physical media as the lack of support for users' already-purchased games (and generally poor design of the device). Sony might be able to pull it off with a fresh launch.