I've seen some very clever augmented reality work with this system. There's some real power in the ability to take visual input from the environment, enhance it, and display it to the user in a more useful format. Most of the actually nifty uses for Glass are camera-related.
I agree the camera is a tremendous benefit. But it's problematic; and there are great benefits without it (half of them by your accountant - it's still a lot).
Specially, a phone/browser you don't have to take out of your pocket. A display that is light and unobtrusive. A form factor that has "headroom to shrink" - smartphone size is limited by having a usable display. But they are hard to read. So we have a trend towards bigger displays, which therefore are both more and less convenient, because of these conflicting benefits. Wearable displays resolve the conflict.
It's very hard, especially for an engineer, to give up fantastic benefits of a new technology. That's why I suspect Google cannot bring itself to drop the camera. In contrast, Apple has often foregone specific benefits for the sake of overall benefits (e.g. no 1080p phone resolution, for the sake of battery life). So I think Apple could bring itself to do this.
I've seen some very clever augmented reality work with this system. There's some real power in the ability to take visual input from the environment, enhance it, and display it to the user in a more useful format. Most of the actually nifty uses for Glass are camera-related.