So, yeah, it apparently was just a pitch from the PR firm.
Banks don't necessarily have the incentives of being any more user friendly than fits the needs to attract and keep customers, and they can use, to some degree, lockin and acquisitions to do that job. Bank Simple, on the other hand, doesn't make money from anything but attracting savings and checking customers, which is the service i want from it, and as that's its only profit stream, its likely to work pretty hard to keep us happy...by doing the work of securing the best banks to work with, rather than leaving that work to me.
USAA doesn't let me put in future transactions such as bills, savings for vacations, etc, which puts me back into using some finance app to track that (which sucks).