Second, having more uses brings more people, liquidity, decentralization, and hash rate. All are good, directly or indirectly, for Monero's security and usefulness.
I think this is pretty important, and we've discussed several times since the start of Monero. If the only thing you can do with Monero is illicit trade, then sellers will just dump it as soon as they get it, in exchange for something they can actually spend. No willingness to hold means no store of value at all. For people to hold money they have to be able to use it for
unknown future purchase needs, and that requires wide acceptability and use. You can't live on drugs alone.
With things like xmr.to making it easy to transact in bitcoins by way of moneroj, you might still want to hold the XMR for the purpose of maintaining your future anonymity needs. Of course, there are other concerns that would likely come into play in this sort of calculus, like the expected future price volatility of Bitcoin vs. Monero.
I am not saying that I'd want to make my transactions public. Rather, there isn't enough incentive to switch to monero JUST because you can keep such trivial transactions private. It's not a big enough motivation for most people.
I'm with you on this. Hopefully, as Monero's development matures/progresses, so will the incentives to switch to it.
It's looking to be a great day! 
