If you are interested in seeing the not very pretty sight of me being totally overwhelmed in my first bogu kumite match from last night, you can view a portion of it here. Also on that web page there's a very good description of the whole point of using the bogu gear and how it applies to karate (and even zen). I'm not sure how long the video will remain on that web page - the web site gets updated fairly often - so if it's no longer there when you take a look, sorry.
Oh, and in case you can't pick me out in the video, I'm the person who is constantly being hit and who keeps backing up.