It makes good sense for large distributed deployments.
One page to update everything rather than have to connect to each device and push a config.
The controller also "back-ports" the configuration as appropriate for a given device. Declare a vLan once, don't have to worry about which cli version is running on a given switch and adjust your command accordingly.
These things don't matter much when you only have one physical location / few devices but if you're an IT guy that manages networking across every physical building in a school district...
Since the device tries to phone home, it's also a NAT buster which is invaluable when you're drop-shipping equipment to customers and have little control over your environment but need to be able to promise some level of functionality.