Ian Davies fails harder than anyone before him

Of course it was a clever move by Opera to turn it into a PR event. Those "bigger than Opera" didn't do that, so nothing really came of it, except some writing in the press.

Opera ensured that it was all over the web.

And no, Opera Mini is not at all useless. It's faster than Safari due to compression. No one is forcing you to use it for banking. But hey, keep failing.