USB 3.0 is going to be one of the fastest adopted technologies ever, and it's going to kill eSATA, Firewire and Fibre Channel dead.
Obviously 97MB/s, if correct, is comparable to low end SSDs or the very fastest spinning platter drives, so if they meet this specification, it's absurd to complain that existing USB2 flash drives, which never had to go any faster than 480mbps, would not go fast enough to exploit USB3. Access speed is entirely a function of how parallel the chip access is, more simultaneous access channels equals more speed. Obviously these pretty little drives will be very expensive because they're the first out, but by the end of this year they will be a commodity item and probably you will pay the same percentage premium that you do now to get small USB2 5V flash drives vs. big USB2 5V spinning-platter drives (don't compare to power-pig drives with wall warts which are cheap because they're clumsy/bad for many purposes including laptop and media playing). What is that price premium, about double? You can already get USB 3.0 enclosures for not much more than USB 2.0 enclosures and fit any SATA-3 (3gbps) drive in them, and there's no way a spinning platter can go 3gbps so these are as fast as any non-SSD will get. Gigabyte is putting USB 3.0 on its whole product line, and so on, and has even boosted the power on it to a (non-standard) 1.5A (standard is 0.9A) to avoid needing separate USB2 cables just for power to the drive.
Don't buy a motherboard without USB 3.0 on it, or you will be buying an add-in PCIe 4x card like ASUS' (two USB 3.0 ports and two SATA6G ports for US$66).
The fact that ASUS has this card suggests it will also be first out the gate with a router that has dual USB 3.0 ports on it to exploit their AiDisk/DDNS NAS technology. It might even be configurable as a RAID1 or allow multiple routers to automatically mirror. When they bother to turn on the full 5GHz and 2.4Ghz capabilities of the Broadcom BCM4718 chip they are already using in the RT-N16 (which is useless for NAS because of two USB 2.0 ports as its only storage option) they will need those USB 3.0 ports and also need to team the gigabit LAN connections (and yes ASUS already sells motherboards with dual Gb LAN connections that team) to provide a combined 2gbps wired and 600mbps (both modes of wireless-N) per router. Considering the advantages of keeping two USB 3.0 backup drives in different physical places over the dangers and complexity of trying to configure a NAS proper (have fun getting your data out when it's the NAS board rather than the drive that blows), and the relative easy of software syncing/mirroring and the reliability of being able to just unplug a USB 3.0 drive from either router and plug it into a computer directly, expect ASUS to sell at least one of its USB 3.0 routers to everyone who buys a USB 3.0 / dual GLAN motherboard from them. They'd be absolutely nuts not to bundle these and push their advantages (gigabit LAN teaming, USB 3.0 syncing/mirroring using AiDisk, DDNS, redundant access points for 5GHz and 2.4GHz to maximize coverage area). This is what I will be doing myself by 2010Q4 with two of the next ASUS router (or the one after that) and the first ASUS dual teaming GLAN mobo that comes with a top-flight IGP that supports OpenCL and using the IGP port with discrete cards doing GPU processing only when required (this saves an astonishing amount of power, nVidia's Hybrid-SLI does it better right now but ATI is leading in terms of getting its GPUs to cooperate for higher end graphics tasks and they also have EyeFinity 3-monitor support).
People who have that kind of configuration will also want to keep absolutely vital and personal data on a little 64GB USB 3.0 stick like these, possibly sticking one of them into each router port and mirroring the truly private personal data onto each. Then when you leave for a while, you simply take both of them out, hide one in a fireproof place, hang the other on your neck, and let your ASUS routers suck down data as fast as they can while you're gone - since they run FTP/BT servers while your computer remains off.
The fun part is that all this will probably cost $80 each for the two routers, $140 for the new teaming dual GLAN motherboard, $66 each to upgrade your old computers for USB3, maybe a hundred for USB3 drive enclosures for your slower SATA-3gbps drives (replaced by say three nice new SATA6gbps SSDs for under $100 each) to become the NAS drives attached to the router(s) and that's only $1000 before you fill out your new box (with even faster SSDs to saturate the 6gbps x 2 RAID0 link). Do it this way and you'll still have 2-gigabit access to your data (teaming dual gigabit LAN ports cost peanuts to add, if you don't have 'em) which is faster than eSATA (in theory) but superfast 6/12 Gbps RAID access to OS and cache. If you don't think 2gbps is fast enough for your media files, buy a USB 3.0 drive enclosure that has HDMI output (H.264 decode, HDCP encode) for media files - these come with a remote as well - just for your TV.
By the end of 2011 any small office not keeping all its data on a NAS at least this fast/capable and not using USB 3.0 for all externally attached drives (forget eSATA, it's dead meat due to no power on the cable and no speed edge over NAS and a speed lag vs. USB 3.0 because eSATA6G came too slow) including probably the little flash drives, and not capable of supporting wireless and VoIP devices at a full 2x 300mbps on both bands (by then people will be routinely sticking two wireless transceivers in laptops) is going to be firing its administrator. 2010-2011 is one of those plateau points when you need to buy the latest stuff (USB 3.0, SATA6G, dual teaming GLAN, H.264 hardware decode, hybrid IGP GPU teaming, dual 5GHz and 2.4GHz wireless-N, wireless-N phones and headsets) so you won't have to worry about technology shifts again for ten years. Yes, ten years. If you buy that now, you can relax until 2020. Why?
10Gb LAN is still so expensive ($700/port) and four-GLAN motherboards still unavailable with desktop type features that it will be probably three or four more years (2014, 2015) before this 2Gb backbone and dual band wireless-N and simple-sync backup drive configuration is really surpassed for a sane price. It will not be "obsolete" for a damn good while after that, because even 3 screens of 1080p can be filled with only 120mbps throughput if they are fed with encoded H.264 and decoded only at or near display devices. So expect it to be 2010 before 10Gb ethernet (and by then it will be powered ethernet at enough wattage to run almost everything without a wall wart) becomes a dominant solution in small office/SOHO.
So, given all that, anyone who thinks USB 3.0 is useless or will be adopted slowly is basically a dummy. Buy the spec above late this year or early in 2011, and laugh at their slow can't-keep-up-with-HDMI USB2 sticks and drives. Or, as we'll call them then, sticks and stones.
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