[stonith]

If you look under features configuration there's options for turning a lot of it off. I agree that the majority probably isn't useful unless you're running without a window manager for some reason, but even just the VCS info is pretty neat.

[nbouscal]

Window manager doesn't necessarily imply menubar. For example, with xmonad, you don't have a menubar unless you install xmobar. This could be an alternative to that, though admittedly that's a really obscure use case.

For me, most of this I don't want, and some I already have (git repo stuff), but some is new and potentially really convenient, especially the stuff for number of sleeping/background jobs.