1. I'm a "bright" light kind of guy. I would much rather have bulbs that can be bright (around the 80-100 watt range) and dim them when I need less light than have darkly lit rooms.
2. Was not aware of the switch you're speaking about. I'll check it out.
3. I mean actually talking to my lights to turn the on and off. In this day and age it has to be easy to design a module that will let me walk into a room and tell Hue to turn on a particular scene, or turn off my lights with my voice when it's time for me to go to sleep. Seems that would have occurred to them a long time ago.
With SiriProxy I actually had that working for a while (voice control of lights), but it's way too hacky and inconsistent (I don't know if they've updated it to even work with iOS 7). That's one little piece Apple left out, developer extensions to Siri. I'm sure they could allow us to add some basic toggles pretty easily- Apps could just "publish" a list of their buttons and Siri could invoke them as if they were the actionable widget. Oh well, maybe in iOS 9 :/