Thoughts on User Stories

I just completed a great agile training that has me thinking about the way we gather requirements. One standout quote comes from Microsoft when they were revamping their production model. They decreed that:

Having the wrong requirements is not an excuse for delivering the wrong product.

As an industry whose end product is working software over comprehensive documentation, I think this edict deserves serious consideration. On one hand, there is something fundamentally scary about allowing our failures to extend beyond the scope of following the documentation. But

It's a paradigm shift away from documentation for documentations sake and toward functionality that produces value.

So where do user stories fit into this?

Here's a traditional requirement:

The system shall only display dates in mm/dd/yyyy format

Here it is re-phrased as a User Story

As an application viewer,
I want all dates to presented in mm/dd/yyyy format
So that I can easily calculate the day of the week with a speciality piece of software that requires this date format.