I'm trying to think of a physical analogy to better understand this: Image you (Alice) have a randomly shuffled (say, by god) deck of cards. You cut the deck in half and distribute one half to Bob and keep the other half (such that by knowing one half, you would know the other). Until either of you look at your respective half-deck, the distribution of cards is in a superposition of all possible distributions (a la Schrodinger's cat). Where the analogy breaks down (thereby illustration what's special about Quantum Teleportation), is that as soon as Alice flips her cards, Bob's cards flip as well (and visa versa). Thus by the time the cards got to Bob, Bob would be able to detect that someone else could have read the cards and thus the information may have been compromised. (This is kind of how I remember quantum cryptography to work, actually).
Does this analogy make sense? My physics background is pretty weak...
This is really just an illustration of quantum cryptography, rather than quantum teleportation. Quantum cryptography is a method of exploiting quantum effects to create a channel that can be used to transmit classical information in a manner that cannot be eavesdropped.
Quantum teleportation is kind of the opposite. It uses a classical information channel in order to transmit -quantum information-, which can't actually be represented clasically. It is actually moving the superposition itself from one place to another. The term "teleportation" is used because the "no cloning" rule (quantum information cannot be "copied") means that the information is no longer in the original location.
This is mostly useful in quantum computers, because in order to actually process information it's pretty important to be able to get it from one piece of the machine to another, and until the recent teleportation breakthroughs building quantum computers that could handle more than a couple "qubits" was pretty much not doable.
Does this analogy make sense? My physics background is pretty weak...