>>Who cares?? > c) Female geeks at tech conferences.
And their friends and coworkers. And people who don't like being pandered to. And people who might have actually been interested in the product. And people who'd rather deal with companies that made an effort to understand who their customers are (unlike the company who had booth babes at the RSA trade show.) If you want an effective booth babe, have her be the lead developer for the interesting product you brought, not somebody in a tight dress.
If you want to sell me your product, you'll bring somebody who can tell me why it's interesting, and ideally somebody who can answer my technical questions about it or at least point me at the information. If you aren't doing that that, I may waste your time and seating space trying to win an iPad after I've seen the booths I care about at a show, but otherwise the best you'll do is get me to pick up a tchochke with your name on it.
I'm fine with booths that have people who are there for entertainment value, as long as you can also get me information, whether that's the noisy shill show or the technical celebrity (it was fun to see Ron Rivest at the RSA show some years ago, and Dan Kaminsky's always broken something important recently.) But if you've got professional booth staff, make sure they know at least a couple of sentences about your products and can point customers to the right people, whether that's the sales rep or the techie, and make sure your display has enough information that I can decide whether to find out more or move on without wasting your time. The kinds of companies that hire booth babes somehow never respect them enough to give them that much training.