For people who care about real privacy, VPNs are useful to hide Tor use from ISPs. You use a nested chain of maybe three or four VPN services, and then hit Tor. Let's say that you were using targeted onion services while the CMU jerks were pwning Tor users. Instead of your ISP-assigned IP, the FBI would just know a VPN exit IP. And they'd need to successively subpoena three or four providers in order to get your ISP-assigned IP.