You're right, but in this case I assumed not the users but the HN-readers were the target audience. And I think many are interested in performance benchmarks. I think it makes a difference wether a site with many requests is quick in comparison to a completely idle site.
Response time is public information where reqs/second is private. This does give some transparency to end users, and I could see sites linking up their status pages to this tool. You do get some more metrics in an actual signed up plan.
