And still, for some companies the bandwidth savings of AV1 are worth deploying today even with the longer encode times of libaom. For example, you can try AV1 streams on YouTube right now:
From my viewing of Youtube, Google transcodes uploaded videos (typically H.264 stuff) to VP9 only when a certain view threshold is reached, which makes sense from their perspective.
However, I have also noticed that due to the chain of encodes source -> H.264 -> VP9 (latter two available to Google), the VP9 stream is often of noticeably lower quality. Thus, whenever I can, I use an H.264 stream.
This problem will not go away with AV1. In fact, from an archival/local usage standpoint, as others have noted here, AV1 is pretty much impractical due to heavy encoding time increases that will unlikely go away with SIMD as compared to x265 or x264.
As such, from an end user experience point of view, what does AV1 offer that H.265/H.264 do not already?
The immediate benefit of AV1 will be felt by people with decent machines but terrible bandwidth as the higher compression will give them higher quality. There's talks given by YouTube employees about this process when VP9 initially rolled out and how different parts of the globe benefitted depending on their tech and infrastructure levels.
However if you want to do live-streaming to a group of friends, its very impractical.
Its only really worth doing a lot of work the encoder once you are sure its not gone change anymore, so work on that is surely ongoing.
But do keep in mind that it's competing against x265 (HEVC) which has been on the market around 5 years now, compared to 5mo for AV1 - it's still early days.
It takes time.