Interesting point of view. I think that it really depends on how do we frame conversations. Of course, machines are machines and they will never engage a conversation the way human beings do. There is also a hype in many areas due to the fact that people are eager to see new technologies in action, in domains in which they are not meant to work, by design.
With this said, there are domains in which bots can make a difference. Usually these are the domains where machines are not expected to have human-comparable conversations, such as discoursing about philosophy or the meaning of life (regardless of some attempts exactly in those two areas).
In contrast, closed-domains are more approachable to a bot, provided her/his designers are aware of the nitty-gritty of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.
We are having a lot of fun with that at Abe.ai