Shameless plug: The main way I am using it, these days, is using Cacophony (a decentralized blogging/vlogging platform I put together).
The other use I have had for it is miscellaneous file transfers between other people: They will stick a big file on IPFS and just E-Mail me the hash so I can grab it. Not as fast as something like BitTorrent but generalizes well (since I was already running it).
For direct file transfer, I typically just use
scp. We were recently sending the files around with IPFS mostly to test its behaviour.