I don't think we are in the target demographic for these 'features'. If you know how to structure queries, and can touch type the usefulness is greatly diminish

I don't think we are in the target demographic for these 'features'. If you know how to structure queries, and can touch type the usefulness is greatly diminished. However there are a lot of people out there that can't touch type and have to reformulate their query multiple times before they get 'acceptable' results. So Google instant actually has a meaningful increase of their iteration time, and thus enables them to find better results faster.