<i>it is a one-line ifconfig invocation for those that understand the terminal and know about ifconfig, which does not hold for the vast majority of users</i><p>I know people who are just as much afraid of the terminal as they are of the network settings.  And stepping someone through opening the terminal and typing something is approximately the same number of actions (in clicks and keystrokes) as navigating to the settings panel and typing in the info.<p>And while I agree that the example of modifying the network settings is contrived and thus not a <i>good</i> example of the usefulness of this setup, the difference between modifying network settings via the system settings GUI and from the terminal with ifconfig is that one will be remembered after a reboot and one will not be despite both having similar surface complexity to change.  This is mainly because the actual settings are buried in some obscure, OSX specific file somewhere that most likely isn't even editable without the GUI (same with Windows (buried in the registry) and with Gnome's Network Manager (buried in ~/.gconf/system/networking/connections)).