I think the general currency or commodity aspects are of less importance than the public ledger.
It's a kind of currency that's main use is in being able to write to a public data store. The most basic data that is stored is value transactions but anything could be stored.
You should really think about it in terms of the kinds of incentives that drive our information economy.
Take a look at Twitter. It operates as a sort of public broadcast medium yet the way that it stores and retrieves leads to vast information asymmetries. Information asymmetries lead to economic asymmetries. Such infrastructure is very costly to operate and leads to perverse incentives to monetize. The information economic model is flawed.
Bitcoin was developed from the ground up with a functional information economic model, regardless of the political expectations of the developers.
But where Bitcoin falls down is in the long term model of currencies. Currencies should only be a medium of exchange, not a long term investment vehicle. We want people to spend or invest money in useful things rather than hoard money. Bitcoins deflationary model encourages hoarding, which in turn diminishes the amount of currency in active circulation, resulting in a sub-optimal medium of exchange.