It has applications further than that, the SIMD architecture of gpus makes them almost perfect as a hugely powerful non general purpose processor. Do you want to use this to handle AI? no. do you want to use this to enable millions of crates to go flying every which way when you fire a rocket? yes. Its essentially what glsl is to Nvidia's Cg, but instead of cg its an open (that's the important thing) CUDA replacement.

Its not that hard, it just requires effort. me and a friend entered the last pyweek (thats a game development competition) and generated tons of assets in just seven days. (see http://www.pyweek.org/e/CS-L/) The point is, procedural content generation should be used when you want an infinate amount of content, when you want the skybox to be constantly changing. when you want the landscape to go on forever. not because your lazy, it will just end up showing itself in your artwork. can you imagine if rembrandt had just copy pasted everything?