Perhaps, the proper analogy is the completion of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, which vastly improved the way that the United States functioned on all kinds of levels. It didn't make it easy to get to places like Devil's Tower, but it did speed up the way we travel. Similarly, the human genome sequence provides the underlying infrastructure that will accelerate research, without fundamentally changing the game at the discovery level.
Basic science is performed in a variety of contexts and model organisms.
The completion of the human genome will allows us to map the significance of these findings in different systems and their impact on humans. The sequence provides the bulletin board by which we can recognize when a fascinating study on an unusual organism bears relevance on biology and medicine in humans. For the world of biotechnology, I think that the human genome sequence will spur progress on a number of different fronts than had been limited by the need to discover specific genes for particular traits. For non-mendelian traits, the localization has been crude, to a resolution of on the order of tens of megabases. Diagnostics technology will be stimulated tremendously because now we have a better sense of what we are trying to measure, and have the information resources to guide the development of technology to assess polymorphisms.