It immediately improves the environmental story if you had previously wanted to use smart contracts but didn't think it was ethical for environmental reasons.
ETH was already potentially useful in the real world if you were on an L2 like zksync - low fees, fast enough to work, decent UX with wallets like Argent. Only thing missing was wide adoption.
Having said that, the merge is actually just the first of a multipart set of upgrades that should make the L2s massively better than they are today. We're still at the 'potentially' useful rather than the actually useful, but things improve the whole time.
ETH was already potentially useful in the real world if you were on an L2 like zksync - low fees, fast enough to work, decent UX with wallets like Argent. Only thing missing was wide adoption.
Having said that, the merge is actually just the first of a multipart set of upgrades that should make the L2s massively better than they are today. We're still at the 'potentially' useful rather than the actually useful, but things improve the whole time.