I don't want to take away from your solution at all - I'm sure I could find some uses for this idea at some point. But your two reasons wouldn't be among them.

Going home from work: generally, I leave stuff running. In fact, I generally kick stuff off before I go home to let the computer keep doing my work for me. So maybe I'm missing a key component of why this is important. Perhaps it's because you need to watch it do its work, and if you're telnetted into a box, and then pack up your laptop, the connection is broken, sending a SIGHUP to your program. That's where VNC comes in - I run that in a VNC server window, and I can reconnect to it when I get back in in the morning.

Suspending to get some CPU time back: that's what ctrl-z is for. And then "fg" to return it to the foreground.

Unix isn't just an environment for running perl, y'know. ;-)

Unix's motto is: Solve one problem, and solve it well. I just string a bunch of these together as needed. I can move about pretty much at will, connecting to servers with stuff running, and monitor, suspend, kill, disconnect, etc., with pretty much impunity. No special code required.