Look it as an alternative to the bookmarking service. You never have to click on a button to record your favorite pages.
I love how I can search history through the address bar to find a site that I know the title or URL of (which, therefore, i wouldn't really have much trouble finding through a search engine if I lost my history), but I find that actually searching for a lost link in browser history is absolutely horribly.
Yesterday evening I got into an argument with a colleague over how GSM works (Vodafone's network in the UK had severe downtime in many areas for much of the day), and I wanted to look up an article I had read in the last month or so about the man who thought up SMS, and his quotes on why it was limited to 160 characters.
It wasn't interesting enough for me to want to bookmark at the time, but it would have been useful last night. I spent about ten minutes trying to find it (through searching for keyworks in the history, to looking for related HN topics, as I know I found that article through a link from this site - eventually I was just scrolling down the list at what I think was roughly the date on which I might have read it).
I definitely read it on this computer, in this browser, within a time period that it is still in my history. Somewhere, but I sure as hell don't know where.
Eventually I gave up and bothered to Google it, what a surprise, it took me hardly any time to find what I wanted.
Afterthought: Maybe the Google should offer to archive your history and provide a search engine of just pages that you've viewed. We get a much better way to trace our footsteps, Google get even more data with which to target adverts towards us, win win.