In my campaign, I've been using Obsidian 1.2 pretty much as-written. We still use original "X successes before 3 failures" Skill Challenges for anything done over a very long period of time: recruiting a faction, building an army, etc., where you make a couple skill rolls here and there until eventually finishing the task. But for anything on a scene-level time scale we use Obsidian.
The "momentousness" of these challenges varies. They have about the same variety of weight as combat encounters, ranging from "random encounter to build up XP" (crossing a chasm, catching a thief on the run) to "boss battle" (convincing an isolationist Elven kingdom to send an ambassador to a Human nation in need of aid). But the unifying factor is that they all require teamwork on some level; anything a single character can accomplish is either a simple skill check or an extended
DMG Skill Challenge as above.
The party isn't very min-maxed, especially with regard to skill challenges. Usually there's only one character trained in the primary skill(s) for the challenge at hand, and the rest have to rely on their one-off creative skill uses or lucky dice rolls to contribute successes. However, we have found some fun uses of utility powers to improve the odds--physical skill challenges often benefit from a judicious use of the Jump spell! The result has been an even mix of full successes and partial successes, but no outright failures as yet.
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