Airport In The Installer (OS 10.5)

If you didn't catch it, while booted from the Leopard 10.5 install DVD, there's an Airport icon in the toolbar.  From there, you can enable Airport and join a network.  In the latest TidBITS, Joe Kissell asks, "Why would Apple include this seemingly useless feature, which can only tempt people to take an unnecessary action that might actually cause problems?"  I'll take issue with the "seemingly useless" connotation.

Airport is just another interface.  We already have Ethernet available to us during the install procedure.  We also have Terminal.app available.  Ah!  Data recovery and rescue.  In the off chance that you only have a wireless connection available, you can boot from the installer, fire up an Airport connection, launch Terminal.app and move files from the local disk to a network resource.  For anyone who's been around Macintosh-land long enough to remember the network-boot floppy images supplied for OS 8 at one point, this should be a welcome addition.

In summary: unnecessary for the install process.  Priceless while booted from the installer as a rescue disk.