This is incredibly useful. That's why Redstone Software has been selling it for years, under the name Eggplant - see  <a href="http://www.testplant.com/products/eggplant_functional_tester" rel="nofollow">http://www.testplant.com/products/eggplant_functional_tester</a> .
It takes a lot of work in QA to figure out why this is useful (back me up on t his one, experienced QA engineers) and the right way to do it so I'll give you the Cliff Notes:
This sort of bitmap recognition lets you automate that "last mile" QA groups can never seem to automate. autohotkeys, selenium, and other things all help automate lots of aspects of the interface with tons of caveats and gotchas. This is a much more useful, if less pleasingly elegant, solution.
When you are automating testing it's relatively easy to automate back-endstuff, write unit tests, write scripts wrapping cli interfaces and so on, but every automation team that deals with GUIs eventually stubs their toe on automating the user interface. BY having the computer automate the GUI task in the same way a human user executes it ( "I want to click the Apple Menu - Where is the Apple icon I know is on top of the Apple Menu? - Ah! There it is! I'll click it" ) you make it easier, or even possible, for the people writing the qa automation to automate the GUI in a reasonable amount of time.
There are some pitfalls. What if someone changes the theme on the automation rig? Well, you're an engineering team, not a preschool - DON'T change the theme!
What if somebody changes an icon in the app you're testing? Fortunately you have access to the bitmap (it's saved with the rst of the build files, yeah?) and of course the change notes for the build  tell you hte iocon has been updated. Well, of course it isn't in the change notes, but when a test that was working fails you can easily run to the point where it says "Can't find the foo button." This is a hint to look for the foo button and think about why it can't be found.
Finally, all good scripting languages have an escape hatch to call otehr programs that can do things better than they can and return a result. Need to check an old COM object through its native interface? Write a small Windows app that your script calls to get that state.
It takes a lot of experience and frustration with trying to fully automate tests on a GUI to understand why this is useful. and the cry of "Bitmaps break because things cahnge" - well, no they don't. Not on a computer . Not if you know what you're doing and have control of the source. (Please disable all auto-update systems on your test rig or you will be surprised at some point.)