First of all, to understand bitcoin we must realise there are actually two bitcoins, we shall call these capital B bitcoin and small b bitcoin for simplicity.
Capital B bitcoin (The Technology) is not a currency, its a decentralised network model for financial security and trust, which ALLOWS currency, and also allows many other things , which we will see in the coming months/years ( very excited!)
Small b bitcoin is the first application built that uses this technology which is also called bitcoin, the currency.
When the internet was first created the first application was e mail, some people were not impressed but they had no idea that e mail was just the first app.
When i started to understand that there could potentially be 100s of 1000s of applications I was gob smacked . Hope this helps people understand bitcoin a bit better.