Getting rid of HTTP will make people more secure. It will ensure that basically all sites people visit will be protected by a trusted cert.
Note that nobody is talking about installable malware here. We are talking about protecting the web. For example, if your connection to news.ycombinator.com is protected by HTTPS, this makes it that much more difficult for the NSA to spy on you, or for me to insert a goatse into the content while you are at work, and I am sitting in the next office over form you.
No we didn't. Telnet is still pervasive as a communications protocol, partly because of its simplicity and partly because of its momentum. This is particularly true in the realm of embedded devices; even rather-modern enterprise-grade HP printers (for example) open up a Telnet port for terminal-driven configuration by default.