Sometimes I'd like to have secure authentication but otherwise have no encryption — the overhead is way too high on slower boxes when you have a good amount of bandwidth available. One classic case I'd run into is using a nice old Sparc workstation as a remote X terminal to a fast new box: if I used SSH to forward the X session its process would regularly spike the local CPU, so I would end up just using a completely insecure X server instead.
It can be too slow even on decently fast boxes when you have gigabits of bandwidth available — I'd just end up piping tar through netcat to avoid the overhead.
What I'm saying is, faster transfers should be possible. And they probably already are, if you're willing to find out how to tweak the OpenSSH settings. Maybe.
This enhancement just saves me the trouble of opening a term window.
Plus, I'd rather use one command than two, makes scripting easier.
It looks like netcat can be substituted with the openssh 5.4 builtin.
