I'm surprised they think the Selenium 1 JavaScipt proxy-injection model is a better approach. But hey, I'm getting old... Get off my lawn, yadda, yadda, yadda. But I'm stunned they think it's better and trying to patent it. I really hope I'm missing some new key insight here. Please enlighten me, people.
Personally I find it much more useful than unit/integration tests because while those test the programmer's understanding of his own code, functional tests actually drive the app, perform normal user actions by driving the GUI. For example, you could have all of your unit tests passing but without functional tests, your OK button may appear off-screen and you wouldn't know.
It is annoying when you make changes to your app because test runs take much longer than unit tests, so I have one general test that I run after a refactor, and then a full suite that runs after commit.