Not everyone has a laptop. One might only have a PC and that would be a pain to carry around. You can do a handheld programmer like I mentioned to Hobbywing and in the Castle thread here, that can also be used as the Hotwire to update the software. All the settings can be changed with the programmer.
I had my laptop at the RC-Monster bash and at that time I didn't have the Hotwire set up in it and imagine if everyone was using a different ESC. Now how would you be able to change setting if needed in a situation like that?