In the present/short term, having a few spots in your home and office you can slap down whatever it is (phone+battery case, headphones, watch) whenever you don’t actively need to use it and just quickly pick them up when you need them. Even a few minutes charge can be handy.

In the medium term, the fact that it is portless and at this point, standardized, are features. Even a modicum of wear and tear can eat through ports (in both the phone and the power brick, but usually the phone) and cables (which is the common failure case if you travel with cables because you otherwise wouldn’t have one every place you need them). Anything that eliminates even a bit of wear and tear necessitating fewer repairs and replacements is a plus. Well the caveat here is I don’t know the failure states of Qi wireless charging pads yet, so there is possibly something I haven’t considered here.

In the long term: I would like a desk, where recessed into this desk is a a pad where I can place my phone, desktop, laptops on top of and have both power and a high speed LAN confined to that desk without the access point in the other room acting as the medium of exchange, and without having to plug every powered device individually into an outlet or cable to charge. This would massively cut down on RF interference, reduce the total number of cables I need to be concerned about, and make keeping the area around my desk clean a bit easier. I manage now, and it is fine, but I really dislike having to replace any cables in my current setup with another cable unless I’m reducing the number of cables, and I strongly dislike having to add to the number of cables in any space I maintain.

Might be a dream, but it is my dream. If all I cared about was keeping my phone charged, proximity charging wouldn’t be a selling point. When I factor in all the other infrastructure in my life I have to keep powered and charged and cabled, it is a much stronger sell.