Cool, I don't think so, dumb yes. I've flown through LGW a number of times this previous year and just found it plain annoying. The first time I had it done there was a booth where two agents were scanning the barcodes however one of them went on break and the other decided to lock themselves out of the system.
Meanwhile close to 200 people and growing were coming to this area to board their aircraft coming down moving walkways to find they couldn't get off, people were falling over and it was a REAL mess! After about 15mins of hanging around one of the guys got off the phone and logged back into his system and were getting people through in a trickle motion.
Seems utterly useless to me.