Pheeww!! Ok, I'm going to quote a few short things from the best explanations I could find, link to the websites, and then link to some wikipedia articles that might help explain things further. Basically, the major advantage of titanium in it's application as a material for lockpicks is, are you ready? Listening? Take note of the next VERY important term:
TENSILE YIELD STRENGTH 
From Wikipedia (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensile_strength): "The tensile strength where the material becomes plastic is called
yield tensile strength. This is the point where the deformation (strain) of the material is unrecovered, and the work produced by external forces is not stored as elastic energy but will lead to contraction (see Poisson), cracks and ultimately failure of the construction. Clearly, this is an important point for the engineering properties of the material since here the construction may lose its loading capacity or undergo large deformations."
Now, the next excerpts come from a very nifty little site I found called 'Metallurgy for the Cyclist' where they discuss various materials used for competetion bicycle frames, and there's an article on titanium, which is very well written and explained; I highly encourage you to visit the site and read the whole thing--
http://spokesmanbicycles.com/site/page.cfm?PageID=331 :
"
Ti's Real Plus: Elongation and Tensile Strength
So titanium gets two second-place marks as compared to steel and aluminum in the first two properties we examined. But when we look at property No. 3, elongation, titanium is miles ahead of either material. This is the property that tells you how far something will bend before it breaks, a kind of safety factor for framebuilders.
Elongation numbers for titanium are often 20 to 30 percent. For comparison, typical steels can be 10 to 15 percent - the higher strength steels go down as low as 6 percent. Aluminum typically runs in the 6 to 12 percent range. Higher strength aluminums again creep into the low range of single digits, with warning bells ringing loudly. Things without much elongation are said to be brittle. Brittle frame failure is not a good thing.
The tensile strength of titanium is also excellent. The cold-worked-stress-relieved yield strength (see "Touring the Ancotech mill" to find out more on CWSR) of the 3/2.5 alloy (that's the alloy usually found in bicycle frames) is typically 100-130 KSI or more. This compares favorably with many steels we find in bicycles. Remember, too, this is achieved with fantastic elongation numbers, and at almost half the weight. And we haven't even talked about fracture toughness and endurance limit yet.
Fatigue Strength
The fatigue strength is another property where titanium performs beautifully (By now, you may be asking: "Is he ever going to say anything bad about titanium?" ). As explained in the previous installments, there is not a definitive measurement of fatigue strength that will tell us how the material will last in a bicycle frame. Bicycles are subjected to forces of varying amounts in a random, cyclic fashion. As long as these loads are kept below a certain level, titanium and steel both have thresholds below which they will never fail. Almost none of the aluminum (including the metal matrix composites), magnesium and beryllium used in bicycle fabrication has a defined endurance limit, so you need to design around it, as was explained last time. "
So what this is all saying is that titanium will bend much farther than steel and still be able to bend back to its original shape--it'll bend a lot farther before becoming plastic (permanently bent/deformed) where you'll have to bend it back to get it back to its original shape, AND it will bend farther beyond the point where it can't bend back before it breaks than steel will--it'll bend farther past it's yield tensile strength before reaching its ultimate tensile strength (where it breaks). This means you've got a lot more leeway with that pick you're working with if it's titanium than if it's steel--even with more pressure than you could put on a steel pick without permanently bending it, TI will still just bend right back without any trouble, and as long as you never reach the tensile yield strength (i.e. you don't permanently bend it where you have to bend it back) it will have an infinite useful life, i.e. you'll never have to worry about wearing it out and having it eventually break on you.
From the Wikipedia article on Fatigue (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_%28material%29)
"Some materials, for example steel and titanium, exhibit a fatigue limit, a limit below which repeated stress has no effect. Most other nonferrous metals, such as aluminium alloys, exhibit no such limit and even infinitesimally small stresses will eventually cause failure."
Oh, and the secondary plus to TI is that it is almost impossible to corrode--air, oxygen, seawater, whatever, can't touch it. It will NOT rust, EVER. So, it's more rustproof than stainless steel, can have it's stiffness adjusted to that of almost any type of steel, i.e. spring steel, and is much more flexible and less likely to ever break than both.
Did that all make sense for everyone?? Sorry, I just think TI picks would be a really cool idea so I'm trying to justify doing it
"I think people should be free to engage in any sexual practices they choose; they should draw the line at goats though."
Elton John
If it ain't broke.....pull it down and see how it works anyway!
