PPC Keyword Research on Google: useful or annoying!?

Google recently made a few "changes" to its AdWords Keyword Research Tool to make it more users friendly and informative. But did it work?
There are some significant improvements in historical data forecasting, including:
- Estimated PPC Ad Position
- Estimated Average CPC
- Advertiser Competition
- Search Volume for previous month
- Average PPC Search Volume in the last 12 month
- Search Volume Trends (previous 6 month)
- Month when the Highest Volume Occurred
- Match Type Option
…which together with CPCs settings can give you a quite substantial picture for you potential keywords choice.
It’s all great and sound but the tool isn’t designed for a large number of keywords.
If you already have a basic keyword list for your pay Per Click campaign and trying to use a tool for a further negatives research, you may find it quite irritating:
•    When Selected Keywords box on the right is getting filled in, so grey box on the left becoming disproportionately large, so scrolling up & down is becoming you main activity.
•    After a certain number of searches the tool may crush or refuse to perform a search.
•    It’s impossible to go through historical data for each one of the keywords, especially if there are hundreds and thousands of them, unless you have an unlimited timescale, which I believe in real terms none of us have.
And two additional the points that I would like to make:
Do we really have to “Type the characters” we “see in the picture below” and how much can we trust Google forecasting considering that Google AdWords Traffic Estimator tool has always been proven wrong?