Yes, offline only, but imho worth the read anyway, even for offline they need to speed up render too, and nice tweaks and speedup ideas lies there (most real-time algo comes from offline ones refined)
I don't think it's a throwaway at all if you switch. I did switch from Ode to Bullet some time ago and felt at home very easily, same concepts even nearly the same names, just more choice and much more speed. The samples are really helpful and demonstrating a lot of what bullet can do.
Even for cpu only, bullet will speed up things a lot from ode. (simd, cache-friendly, better algos, etc.) And bullet 3.0 will have gpugpu for nearly everything.
So switching might help easing the burden on cpu a lot and will help for gpu switch afterwards