There IS a nicer way to present fingerprints to be much more human readable: map every few bytes to the whole dictionary word. There is a RFC for that:
I've seen business cards with PGP fingerprints encoded as QR codes. That's a pretty neat idea.
Except you never notice when someone switches the QR code, as Tomte says.
You could do that by printing it on a business card or reading it over the phone, and then the other guy is going to have to type it in somewhere.
The reason trusted third party keeps on coming up, despite all the myriad fundamental problems, is exactly because slinging that around is so unattractive.