Personally, I'm ambivalent on Palin-I know she is primarily a local politician, and my experience with local politicians has been less than stellar. But you may be right on every single one of the qualities you identify.
As an objective evaluation of what this does to the election, though, I think your personal appraisals of Palin's strengths will be mostly irrelevant, because of the methods by which the McCain campaign has attacked Obama's experience. The more Palin's local experience and short stint as a governor are played up, the more bizarre McCain's attacks on Obama's community organizer, law professor, and Senate experience will appear, because most people don't know who Palin is, and none of the people who have a chance of voting for Obama are likely to share your strong confidence in her hunting and fishing "regular folks" bona fides.
So as a practical matter, while she may indeed be the best person to ever be on the run to Washington, this pick shows a lack of good campaign sense on the part of McCain. Considering that Obama has been nothing short of a brilliant campaigner so far (with the exception of trying to negotiate with the Clintons for their "support"-but then McCain just did that with his VP pick, apparently), this will not bode well for McCain in November.