True there is an awful lot of COBOL about and lots of people are using it in the way that you say. However the fact that it is widespread does not mean that it is still widespread through choice, it just means that it has been very popular in the past.

Think about how much money has been spent in the last five years making sure that legacy systems written in COBOL could handle the year 2000. OK, got that mental picture? now imagine how many magnitudes greater the task of rewriting all! of that code in a more modern language would be. Scarey!

I have a friend who works for British Telecom on their billing software. The legacy stuff is all COBOL, but anything they write now is done in c. If COBOL was so wonderful more projects being written now would be written in COBOL.