Yes, but if your family doesn't know what your printed QR-code in your drawer is, your bitcoins are also going to disappear if you die.

I kind of like the idea that the bitcoins disappear with their owner: it's like a donation to the bitcoin community since the value of the remaining bitcoins is increased in proportion of the lost coins.
That's the beauty of a limited money supply combined with infinite divisibility.

That is true for the current implementation of the C++ client, which, considering it's still beta is not a trivial point. Alternate change output is an unintuitive hack which fails to create anonymity but successfully creates confusion and lost coins.

EDIT: Demonstrating the point are 3 of 4 posters on this page with a presumably static bitcoin address in their signature.

I think his point is that people will continue to use the same receiving address even after they've transferred some coins from it, leaving some coins at their known account and some at various accounts unknown to them. This makes it very hard for human beings to know what they need to protect in order to be assured of not losing their coins.

You're right.
For the piggie bank you can leave precise instructions so family can redeem the bitcoins.

Sure.

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Assuming a dumb user who uses a simple password (this is always a starting condition for designing any system) this means that when they pick their bad password, they will eventually lose all their money to someone who just brute forces it.

I could see just using a large random alphanumeric string for the seed for the wallet, so in essence a user could just copy their entire wallet by just copying that string.

You could have a client that when it starts up it generates the string, or asks if you already have one. At that point, bang, you have any number of addresses at your disposal. If you want to backup, all you need is the seed string for the client. If you want to move (or keep in sync) with another client, you just copy the string into it. A client could handle multiple wallets, each with their own string. Your wife and you (or a group of people in an organization) could share a joint wallet that both have the same string, but you would each also have your individual wallets.

Your wallet becomes a minuscule line of text. The only thing that might add some weight is if you use an address book.

That is why the passcode itself shouldn't be something the user created, and is some very long string. Though this isn't a mental bitcoin wallet, it makes for a very easy to copy, sync, backup, and even printout and archive wallet.

Just for fun I may eventually take a common top 1000 passwords list create addresses based up them, and see if they ever pop up as being funded.

Then your head explodes.