At this point the benefit of my 1k status appears to be United drink coupons (I think they actually come with silver premier status) and less time on hold to resolve constant problems.
I like the "less time on hold" part. This has been true for reservations issues (my average wait time is less than 5 mins for that), but not for MileagePlus, where I've managed to get through once (45 mins wait after hearing "the average wait time is 3 minutes"), had to just hang up after 30-60 mins a few times (I do have to do some work once in a while), and gotten the "unfortunately, blablabla, goodbye" a number of times.