Popular Science comes up with an article on an real life powered armor.
It comes on the heels of a CNN report (link to video) a couple months ago.
It's a good article with a lot of detail. I'm struck by how close this functional exo-suit is to the concept Robert A. Heinlein setup in his book Starship Troopers. Unlike the movie "remake", in the book the infantry is an elite all-volunteer force that uses powered armor. There are sensors in the armor that detect how the user is moving their limbs and they move to negate the load, just like how the XOS Exoskeleton works.
It is an agile suit that takes the load off of the human wearer while exactly mimicking their movements. This allows the suit to carry and move a lot of weight without fatiguing the... pilot.
The biggest hurdle for the concept is power. Currently it can run on internal power for about 40 minutes, a much longer duration would be required before true battle use. Also various hardening and redundancy systems would be required before it could be fully militarized.
Innate coolness of battle forms aside, such a vehicle may have more use behind the lines. As mentioned in the articles the suit's strength makes it very useful for repair, maintenance, loading and unloading. Pretty-much any task that requires heavy lifting. Consider it a much more flexible and agile forklift.
Another nice feature is that such a role, would likely be on base or ship and thus power and maintenance issues for the suit would be less.
For pure military engineering fanboyism it doesn't get much better than this.
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