My first impression was that this was a classic example of Zeerust: why have a humanoid robot type data into a system, instead of just directly interfacing with the system?
Almost simultaneously, though, another thought struck me: Wow, that's one way to check the spread of viruses and malicious software.
Not quite so "quaint" from that perspective, is it?
A few other Perfectly Reasonably Explanations occurred to me later -- it's easier to establish some degree of uniformity in user interfaces than it is in underlying code, for instance.