How is quantum teleportation any better than regular transfer of information?

After the article that China "teleported" a particle into orbit, I'm trying to understand the applications of quantum teleportation. It sounds like a nice oddity of the universe, but has very little to no practical value. I'd love to be corrected, but from what I understand, the basic procedure is this

1. Alice and Bob split up a pool of entangled widgets



2. Alice and Bob move far away from each other


3. Alice does black magic to her pile of widgets, through blacker magic this affects Bob's pile of widgets instantly

This sounds all well and good, until I hit this part:

4. Alice sends the new configuration of her pile of widgets to Bob through traditional channels


5. After Bob gets the information from Alice he knows what state his pile of widgets should be in

This is great and all, but since Alice sends a the new configuration of her pile of widgets to Bob through traditional channels, what is the point of even using the widgets? It seems like we've added a bunch more complexity for no real reason other than "Hey, this is cool".

Answer

There are several reasons quantum teleportation is a useful way to move qubits, even if you already have a normal quantum channel.

1. 
   

   Latency reduction. Suppose the quantum channel has decent bandwidth but high latency, e.g. boxes of qubits put on trucks being driven across the country. If Alice uses the truck to send a qubit to Bob, it'll take days for the message to arrive. But if the truck is loaded with EPR halves, then the truck can be dispatched early (or in a steady stream of trucks) before Alice even knows what she'll be sending with those EPR halves. Then, by using the classical internet to send the measurement results needed to complete the teleportation, qubits can be sent in tens of milliseconds instead of over days.

   
   


2. 
   

   Error recovery. If Alice sends a qubit to Bob and some noise on the quantum channel (e.g. the truck full of qubits falling off a cliff) scrambles the message, that qubit is gone. Too bad so sad. But, when performing teleportation, the qubits you send over the channel are just EPR halves. If one gets lost, you can make more. Just keep trying until one of the EPR halves makes it through the channel, then use it to teleport the actually-precious qubit across.

   
   


3. 
   

   Backwards transmission. Suppose the quantum channel is one-way-only, so Alice can send qubits to Bob but Bob can't send qubits to Alice. No problem, just use the channel to build up entanglement (by sending EPR halves) then use those to power teleportation from Bob to Alice. Teleportation turns any mechanism for creating entanglement (plus a classical channel, which we have thanks to the internet) into a mechanism for sending qubits.

   
   
   


4. 
   

   Quantum Computation. A bunch of gate constructions and fault tolerant quantum computation schemes use slightly-tweaked teleportation to apply operations (e.g. read https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.7290). Some designs of ion trap quantum computers use teleportation to combine small modules into a single larger computer. Etc.