The policy of the Swiss NB to draw a line into the sand at a very deep point was so far successful, and the Euro is still hovering above it, despite it came closer in the turmoil of the last days. Traditional monetary policy has indeed run out of room, which forces me to once again make a nod to Keynes, so other tools were needed to achieve the desired effect. This policy has a couple of effects, even if it won't be able to stem the tide of liquidity into the "safe heaven" Switzerland.

1) The Swiss economy, especially the export, the retail in border areas (Switzerland is small and well connected) and tourism sector suffered already heavily due to a Franken, widely seen as overvalued. This will at least mitigate that damage

2) It helps those in Europe which took a credit in the Franken, a strategy rather popular a couple of years ago in Austria and some regions of Italy and especially in countries like Hungary where the rates on the own currency were relatively very high. (A 'very' controversial law was passed in Hungary to mitigate the effect of the big slide of the Florint against the Euro at the cost of the banks)

Anyway around 1950 you got 1 CH for roughly 1 DM, perhaps the unofficial reseve currency of Europe, around 1970 even more then that and around 1995 quite a bit less then that. Before the SNB acted like it did you got at the lowest point roughly 1 CH for 1 Euro. In fact the CH gained roughly 90% in the last 20 years...