voltronic, your point (disagreeing with my phrase "fairly useless in practice") is well taken for people such as yourself, for whom a good tie-off arrangement is almost second nature; I bet you would almost never think of NOT doing it.
But when a shock mount doesn't give you the means for doing the tie-off, the onus lands on you for the required extra effort and planning, and bringing along the extra bits such as Velcro straps. Each aspect of that is a potential "point of failure" for people whose technical self-discipline and awareness may not be perfect all the time. If I forget something when I pack for a recording, I won't have time to go back home and get it. To have some anxiety about that is part of my personality, and I want to reduce that anxiety (and, of course, the rate of actual, practical failures due to my forgetting something) as much as I reasonably can.
Maybe more to my point, judging from what I see, for a lot of people the necessity of a good cable tie-off isn't "second nature" at all--they've never heard of it, or they think it doesn't matter much, or whatever (I can't read their minds). But it doesn't get done, I see it a lot and I'm sure that you see it, too. Even in studios and (in the past, before wireless became so prominent) on television.
For me personally--I mean, the Shure rubber donuts are an elegant design that "says what it means" visually. Also, they're fun to play with; I would gladly give one as a toy to a two-year-old. But after a while I stopped using them, because for me, it's normal for a shock mount to have a tie-off mechanism of some kind--so to my way of thinking, I have to cater specially to shock mounts that don't (in the ways mentioned earlier). Call that circular reasoning or perception, but that's how it looks from where I live.
--best regards