The bigger deal is the confusion it creates and the assumptions a lot of the users of self signed certs (and certs in general) make about security.
Lastly I want to point out that if your certificate is signed by some external entity that doesn't prevent you from doing out-of-band management of your public key. As long as your private key is secret you never lose any security by having your cert signed by a third party. People can argue about how secure that signature is vs. those agencies who can force the third party to reveal their secret key but while that's an important consideration, until the government sells my banking information to somebody I mostly care about this at a principle level.
If you are talking about a thick client, with the appropriate checks built in, I'll agree that it's possibly more secure. Other than that, its only possibly more secure if you are the only user or you can eliminate the security warning (e.g. by distributing the certificate).
I'm skeptical that any US based company could get away with not rolling in the face of a subpoena/NSL so the protection provided by the service provider knowing they have been compromised is minimal IMO.
No, but it's not easier, either - without verification, it's exactly the same. It's not meaningful to try and make SSL secure in the situation in which out-of-band verification cannot be done. If there is no out-of-band verification, all SSL fails to protect against MITM.
At the very least, it protects against passive snooping (ie, the NSA).