The specification being drafted for the next version of USB promises around ten times the throughput of the current one. That is genuinely useful and it is not why USB matters.
USB matters because of what it replaced, and it is worth remembering how bad that was. A computer used to have a serial port, a parallel port, two round sockets for the keyboard and mouse that were not interchangeable despite looking identical, a game port, and a SCSI card if you were unlucky enough to need one. Each with its own cable, its own rules about whether you could connect anything while the machine was running, and its own way of failing.
All of that is now one socket that everything fits.
The part that deserves more attention is that USB won while being technically worse than its main rival. FireWire moved data faster in practice, sustained it better, allowed devices to talk to each other without a computer in the middle, and supplied more power. On the engineering it was not close.
It lost anyway, and the reasons were licensing and who was behind it. Apple charged a fee per port. Intel put USB into the chipset, which meant it appeared on every machine at no marginal cost to the manufacturer, whether or not anyone had asked for it. Once every computer has a socket, every peripheral maker builds for that socket, and the better connector becomes the one you use for camcorders.
That is the whole lesson and it generalises well beyond cables. The value of a connector is the number of things that fit it, so ubiquity compounds and technical merit does not. Being adequate and everywhere beats being excellent and optional, every time, and it is not a close contest.
Which is also why I am unexcited about the speed increase. Almost nothing you plug in can saturate what exists today. A printer does not need it. A keyboard needs a rounding error of it. A camera transferring photographs is limited by the card inside it.
The exception is external storage, and it is becoming a real exception now that drives are being built from flash rather than spinning platters. A flash disk can genuinely outrun the current connector, which means for the first time in years the cable is the bottleneck rather than the thing on the end of it.