Yes, I agree that the applications for word vectors are not made as clearly as it should be. One direct application is as the first layer of a neural network [1], which could be part of either a 1-dimensional convolution or a recurrent neural network. Using pre-trained word vectors is a form of transfer learning and allows for much more predictive models with smaller amounts of training data.

[1] https://blog.keras.io/using-pre-trained-word-embeddings-in-a...