There are few moments I remember as clearly as making that decision.
As I see it, the purpose of search engines is to route around squatters and find real content, no matter where it's hosted.
The domain name is also many times your brand. So it's true that you may not type "whatever.com", but you still type "whatever". In this particular instance, "whatever.com" actually exists, but has no content on it and thus it doesn't have a high ranking. But in other cases a developer of something like "go-whatever.ly" may end up with a world of hurt.
For startups, these considerations don't even factor in the importance that investors themselves place on well picked domain names.
If you think domain names are not important anymore, you're wrong.
Incredibly wonderful -- and very surreal. It's bizarre to think that only twenty years ago, the Internet was an entirely different culture.
And they started charging $70, IIRC!