Maybe so,, but associate contains the word "ass." Not to mention the fact (but I will) that the word list sounds awfully close to the word "lisp."
I use the buddy list as a quick means to pm people without sorting through the hundreds of PM's I receive. Also useful for chatting to those that don't post much and can't find their names on the forum. I think a really cool feature, would have ET e-mail you at the end of the day to alert you that your buddy posted, and provide a link directly to his previous posts, I already disabled subscribing to forum posts as their are so many, I'd rather appreciate an end of day thing summarizing it or just alerting that posts have occured.