The most obvious one for me has been "real time" capture of things which do not have parameters recorded, per se. The biggest example of this is a synth with non-synchronized oscillators... if you hit the same key/chord over and over again, the sound alters with each firing, so even a freeze of such may be different than it was during last playback. Even in something "simple" like a screen capture of a "synth in action" required an external loopback for me in the past because not all things adjusted/tweaked get captured on the fly.
To your point of functionality, much of the rest is another method of what has existed prior.