Its pretty easy to use points to book rooms for other people, I was able to gift 4 reservations a few weeks back for an event. All I had to do was write "Gift Reservation for xyz person" in the Request option.
Even considering you can book rooms for others, there's still a huge segment of the population (50%?) where hotel points are still completely useless. There's a time in my life hotel points would be completely useless to me too. Many people don't travel and don't have friends/family who travel either, it's as simple as that. The HN crowd seems to believe that everyone is taking a few vacations to far away places a year but that's simply not the case, most people I know do not travel at all and do not want to either.
Plus, even you wanted to use them they would have to have a hotel at the destination where you also wanted to travel to.