hyphenated names are useful for search engine use, hyperlinked, and printed matter for ease of reading. But, in my opinion only if you already have the non-hyphenated version.
First verbally, you don't want to say "ice dash cream dash cones dot com" if you do anything at all verbally like take phone calls or use radio or tv advertising. Now if you can say icecreamcones.com and use ice-cream-cones.com for printed matter and search engine registration that's even better than having just the non-dashed version.
Secondly, if someone else has the non-dashed version, they will accidentally get a lot of your traffic since people have become accustomed to not putting dashes in URL's. No one want to pay for their competition to get the advantage of their advertising dollars. Now if you are a smaller regional business, and it's a choice between ice-cream.com and icecreamcones.tv or icecoldicecreamcones.com , I'd choose the hyphenated 2 word .com name.
Third, as for the phone number comparison, everyone in north america is used to the pattern of 123-123-1234 for phone numbers. in domain names sometimes it isn't clear. if you don't pronouce the dash is it icecream-cones.com or ice-cream-cones.com in the case of a compound word.
Some names are almost a must for promotion with the dash when they can be read as different words. If your product was gas-ex, I think gas-ex.com is better so it isn't read as ga sex.com (one being seen as someting to rid gas, the other as sex in Georgia). I would still want the non-dashed though so it wasn't used by someone else.
