Hardware wallets should help immensely as well.
Adding a BTC to a transaction doesn't really require any additional infrastructure. But once you've packed your first tanker with gold, you kind of have to hire a second boat.
Given the way each scales, it seems that BTC transfers are easier, at least at some values.
All I was saying was that physical stores of value increase in awkwardness (principally through weight and volume) when you increase their number, not so for digital.
Challenges in movement of large sums of gold: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/08/23/how-to-get-...
Here's what $300 Billion in gold looks like: http://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-arti...
(Note that it would be harder to transport, than, say, the amount of gold one can fit in a pocket.)
As with _all_ security, there's a tradeoff between security and convenience. Inline wallets are spectacularly convenient - and guess what that implies security-wise?
Paper wallets are much more hassle. But a paper wallet in a bank vault is arguably up there with the most secure bitcoin storage techniques.
As the stored value of your bitcoin varies - so should your security requirements. If I need to keep under $100USD available to pay for my anonymous vpn or my torrent-box vps - an online wallet (who's operator could make off with my half or quarter of a bitcoin at any time) might be a sensible choice. If I'd been mining bitcoin at a reasonable rate since 2009 and was sitting on a house-worth of bitcoins, I'd make a _very_ different choice.
Consider the value of your wallet(s) - if they were piles of $50 notes, how much would you spend securing that? Would you leave it in your pocket? Hide it under you mattress? Buy a lockbox or a safe for your home? Rent a safe deposit box? At what stage is a never-internet-connected laptop a perfectly sensible expense to incur? I'd suggest a lot of people I see posting in forums about how much they lost in onine-wallet-hack-de-jour who should be kicking themselves for not having a dedicated $300 laptop fr storing their wallets on.