Heh... in a way it's not any easier for the lay person, but at least now with the new SI prefixes, it is very specific and certain that you are talking about 2^10's rather than 10^3s. I can guess that the idea behind this was that since the kilo, Mega, Giga prefixes are powers of ten, then to be consistent and straightforward, 2^10 multiples should have their own prefixes.
I don't know if the world outside of the computer science community will ever fully embrace this system, but it is a pretty common question I get from people... "How come my 200 GB hard drive only shows up in Windows as 186 GB?
With consumer disk drives exceeding 1TB capacities, that discrepancy will become significantly more noticeable than it was with 100 MB drives.
100,000,000 bytes = 93 MiB - a 7 MiB discrepancy
1 TB = 0.909 TiB - a "loss" of almost 100 Gigs!
As for Dopus, it'd be neat to be able to select the units you want. Maybe, as with one of the number formatting packages for Perl, you could arbitrarily specify your own unites for any unit you like... Probably not useful unless it's really easy to do, but an idea.