Hiring Indian "personal assistants"

[teddyFBI]

So I heard about this for the first time a couple months ago, and then saw it mentioned in this this thread, and after some googling, found this great article and must admit: I'm now intrigued.

The first time my friend told me that she had a personal assistant, I thought "meh, spoiled child needs someone to buy her groceries and pick up her laundry, but I guess it'll save her some time." Then she told me the assistant was in India and I was officially WTF(?!)

After she explained to me how it worked -- e.g. you send them tasks like picking out birthday presents for friends/fam, finding mexican restaurants in a city you're traveling to, etc -- I was even more confused...most of all, perhaps b/c this girl isn't stupid or lazy. In fact, she's pretty sharp, logical (for a girl), funny, sarcastic...she's actually got a lot of the same attributes I pride on having myself, which made the seemingly-harebrained Indian personal assistant thing all the more perplexing. She tried explaining it to me (raving about it), but I still didn't get it. If I want to find a Mexican restaurant in Vancouver, give me around 3 minutes on Google. If I need to pick out what movie I want to see this weekend, again >> just give me a few minutes to browse through the Yahoo critic reviews and I'm all set. In short, I simply couldn't imagine what possible scenario would lend itself to an outsourced Indian personal assistant doing a more efficient job than I could do myself (factoring in the time it would take me to actually explain to them what I want). In fact, that's what gets me the most >> it seems like I'd spend 10 minutes typing up an email to them explaining the task, when I could simply accomplish it myself in half that time.

But, like I said, I have a lot of respect for this girl > she's not an idiot, and I feel like I must be missing something here that would lead an otherwise intelligent and reasonable human being to use this service. I really do WANT to understand this, but I'm struggling. Anyone here make use of these services and have anything positive/negative to say about them?