A personal PayPal account used to serve some purpose. Now they're useless unless you want to open a new one every few weeks for small payments - going through the hassle of verifying them as you go and risk being banned/limited because you're opening more than one.

A premier account is used for personal sales and doesn't have the limitations that make the Personal account totally useless. The rates are higher and the limits are lower than a Business account however. That is to say, a Business account will start you at the same rate, but you can get a lower rate by increasing volume.

Business accounts also allow you to use IPN (instant payment notification) to automate a shopping cart as well as move to Web Payments Pro which allows you to use your web site's interface instead of moving people over to the PayPal page to make payments.

There are no fees to send money for the Premier and Business accounts. Only to receive.

PayPal is a payment gateway and processor, intended primarily for business. It is not a generalized way of moving money around.

I'm sure that in the US, like everywhere else in the world, someone can directly deposit money into your bank account if they go to a branch of your bank with your name, branch number (routing code in US) and account number. This is not the same thing as a wire/TT transfer. The payer would show up with cash to a branch of the payee's bank and make a deposit just as if it were the payee doing it.

There's also a postal money order which last I checked was still somewhat cheap in the US. Benefit versus a personal cheque is that it' as good as cash and shouldn't incur any hold period while waiting for the funds to clear.

Personal banking in North America is a good 15 years behind most of Europe and it doesn't look like that situation is improving any time soon. Most of the banks in Canada ad the US spend their time figuring out how to apply ever greater service fees without actually offering any new services.