One thing that hasn't been mentioned is the huge potential for electrically-powered commercial aircraft. We had a solar-powered airplane land in Dayton, Ohio last week as a planned stop-over on its globe circling flight... at night! I hope they didn't "cheat" by charging the batteries overnight in the hanger! Better battery chemistry is sorely needed, and it will be exploited, not suppressed. And of course battery-powered quad-copters and hex-copters are all the rage now. I expect one big enough to carry a human pilot is not too far down the road. As others have noted, we do not yet have the infrastructure in place to support massive use of electric cars, electric buses, or electric airplanes. Electric trains running off diesel motor generators are old technology, but imagine replacing the diesel engines with a battery bank. Or how about cargo ships operating from batteries. Submarines led the way on this, but recharging with diesel engines or carrying your own nuclear reactor on board is hardly a commercially viable enterprise. Point is: better batteries open up more markets.
Electrically-powered commercial aircraft are almost definitely never going to happen, barring some extreme leap in physics. Remember, unlike cars, trucks, trains, and boats, aircraft have to
lift their energy source, so energy density is critical. It's possible to make a short hop no cargo aircraft run on batteries and/or solar power, but to do something useful you need a lot of energy density in your energy storage medium, and liquid hydrocarbons are orders of magnitude better than batteries. Also, keep in mind that today's quadcopter drones have flight endurance times measured in minutes with payloads of a couple pounds at most.
That's not a significant problem, since (at least in the US) aircraft use only about 3% of the oil consumed each year. In the case where we've eliminated most of the rest of that consumption, continuing to run aircraft on hydrocarbon fuels isn't an environmental disaster.
Battery-powered trains are theoretically possible, but it'd be far more efficient to electrify the tracks instead of hauling around tons upon tons of batteries (that's tons upon tons of cargo you aren't hauling!), and then having to spend hours to days charging them.
As for ships, you've got similar issues to trains with the weight and volume of batteries. I think you underestimate how much power a big cargo ship's engine puts out. We're talking about 7MW to 70MW 2-stroke diesel engines, and these things are sailing for weeks at a time. Can you visualize a
gigawatt-hour of batteries? How about charging them? It's more likely that an electrified cargo ship would use primary cells instead of rechargeable cells due to energy density, using a chemistry like aluminum-air and just recycling the batteries after every trip.