Crosby et al. conclude: We have shown that, even though the Internet induces significant timing jitter, we can reliably distinguish remote timing differences as low as 20µs. A LAN environment has lower timing jitter, allowing us to reliably distinguish remote timing differences as small as 100ns (possibly even smaller). These precise timing differences can be distinguished with only hundreds or possibly thousands of measurements.
If you'd like to bet that this sort of statistical analysis will get harder to perform over time, I'll take your wager. I'm not willing to wait until someone is publicly compromised before I fix security vulnerabilities—I do not work for an employer who's willing to tolerate a few break-ins before fixing the locks.
I'd also argue that a) a timing attack vulnerability is "weak/poor crypto," b) I don't need to write about the importance of other attack vectors (XSS, CRSF, social engineering, telepathy, bats, etc.) while writing about timing attacks, and c) if timing attacks are easy to understand and fix there would be less of them.
(Edit: fixed the B&B paper link. Derp.)
(edited to have the link i meant).
Seems like other, more traditional problems (weak / poor crypto, social engineering) are much more important problems.
I kind of wonder if people just really like timing attacks because they're so easy to understand, and, once you spot them, so easy to fix.