IPMI does rather more than than giving you console access, though it's serial, not VGA. Typical server BMCs which embed IPMI do more again. Not to defend the quality of various BMC firmware and support I've encountered...
It was more the remote power/boot/install process which seems unnecessarily complicated these days compared to serial.
An elegant weapon for a more civilised age, or something ;-)
Booting a live cd or installing windows at 1MByte/s speeds (late 1990s CDROMs were faster!) is horribly slow. Maybe iLO5 was a bit better.
usually found it easier (but annoying) to just walk over with a USB drive…
I've found iLO 4 virtual media support most useful for booting DOS-hosted firmware updates supplied as El Torito ISO images that aren't natively bootable from USB flash in a world where you can no longer find CD-R blanks at every corner drug store, and where newer machines commonly lack the legacy BIOS support required to boot the image at all.
It's also a fine way to boot minimal BSD or Linux rescue/netinstall images that don't involve live-booting a full desktop environment, or for installing smallish OSes like ESXi in cases where trading increased wallclock time for slightly reduced effort is justifiable.