Yes, a lot. Also, the GPIO pins are there just because they are, and why not? There's enough pins, why not route them out?
You need gpio pins for random kiosks (web access, photo printing/scanning, etc. to control the leds, lights, etc., even coin slots), retro arcades (to get input from joysticks, buttons, etc.), robotics (camera for video, a lot of cpu for processing, gpio pins to control the movement), advanced sensor boards (where the processing is done on the device), smart home stuff, etc.
"Back in my time", we used to use parallel ports for that... 8 very limited gpios were enough to drive a few leds or read some data from an external device.
You need gpio pins for random kiosks (web access, photo printing/scanning, etc. to control the leds, lights, etc., even coin slots), retro arcades (to get input from joysticks, buttons, etc.), robotics (camera for video, a lot of cpu for processing, gpio pins to control the movement), advanced sensor boards (where the processing is done on the device), smart home stuff, etc.
"Back in my time", we used to use parallel ports for that... 8 very limited gpios were enough to drive a few leds or read some data from an external device.