Not yet.. but with the Bank of England looking seriously at digital GBP, I expect the context will change 6months+ from now. It's likely that BoE will back off owning the risk of hosting its own network. Other options like pegged assets such as BitShares offers will always be a good alternate to actual digital fiat.
The option that makes bitXYZ really useful, will be a debit card that can spend digital currency; and I suggested as much in my reply to the UK.gov call for information. Whether that is at the point of sale or a sale ahead of time crediting the card in whatever currency that debit card company prefers, won't matter; what matters is method that makes digital currencies useful.. once one exists, it'll be trivial to offer the option to all.
What BitShares offers right now and will continue to offer in the future, is a real simple option to play the differences in markets. If you have more confidence in USD than BTS you move across to bitUSD and the inverse when you consider BTS will rise. So, right now you can use any BitShares asset to draw a profit from the volatility in BTS. I'm no expert at this but apparently there are already bots available to play the exchanges and the more options that are real world assets, the more likely BitShares will attract those who do understand the skill of playing markets.
So, 1. No, obviously not. 2. is a fallacy that ye olde banks will have a necessary place in the new world. Those old banks will need to evolve too and be more flexible, otherwise they will become redundant. The big money will be the service that offers the debit card for digital currencies.