Comments field: useful or useless?

Apple posted a Pro Tip recently about adding comments to your files and folders instead of using labels. This is all well and good, but there is a sense in which the Comments field is actually lame and not very useful: nobody ever looks at it! It's not even the default behavior to show comments in the Finder. You have to enable Comments as a visible field from the Finder view preferences (Command-j from a Finder window will bring up this dialogue), and this you can only do whilst in List view. And who wants to be in List view all the time, when you could be in Column view? (I suppose some people must use List view exclusively... can anyone testify on this?)

Plus, if you're not content to hang around in List view, the Comments field isn't the easiest thing to get to. First,
you have to click on the folder or file in question. Then, do a command-i to bring up the Get Info window. Then, look way at the very bottom of the Get Info window (Command-i) to see where the Comments live. Then, click on the expander triangle to actually see and edit the field. Harry Potter had an easier time finding the Sorcerer's Stone! After you've been through all that, I have more bad news for you: the field isn't searchable, and won't show up in your Finder search results.

What should really happen is that the Comments field should be way more accessible. Whenever your mouse rolls over a file or folder that has associated comments, those comments should display, 'tooltip-style,' and disappear when you mouse out. You should be able to edit the comments more easily, as well – maybe have a command in the Ctrl-click contextual menu to 'Edit Comments.' And obviously, the Comments field ought to be searchable if we're going to make that metadata very useful.

Maybe Spotlight will address some of these very issues?
Does anyone have any tips for more productive usage of the Comments field?