Nowadays it's critical to the operation of a quantum computer on the inside, but the question at hand is whether it is useful over longer distances. I hope the discussion above gives you some idea of the things we are working to realize.
If you're with me so far, that's roughly the way we use entanglement; taking some combination of the shape and flavor and mixing it with the other qubits at each end to entangle larger sets of qubits. But there's actually a catch in entanglement:
If we just talk about the flavor or shape, well, the cookies might have secretly been shaped & flavored, but we just don't what they are. That would just be classical correlation, not entanglement.
THEN it turns out that there is still a statistical correlation between the outcomes of the measurements (shape, flavor, flape) at the two ends...in some way that CANNOT be just a hidden characteristic of the already-shared cookies.
Since that discovery in the 1960s, it has been proven with increasing rigor in experiments. I won't go into them here, but search for "loophole-free Bell inequality" if you want to know more.
Yeah, it's weird, and it's not as easy to understand as a broken cookie. Sorry, this is the best I can do without skipping some critical facet of entanglement.
By now, hopefully you can see that there is an ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL NEED for data center-scale #QuantumNetworks. There are also Big Science things you can do with a wide-area #QuantumInternet or with related technology such as LIGO's squeezing.
Whether wide-area entanglement has truly compelling economic uses that will warrant deployment of a new global information infrastructure, well, that's a little harder to see. But would I bet on it? I already have. I've spent a good chunk of the last two decades working on this.