I still have one, and that's exactly what I use it for: To record a show for someone.

I tried burning it to a DVD from an MPEG recorded from a TV card on my computer, but it took way too long (both in actual time, and how much time I had to spend messing with it) and they had trouble with it as well.

So the VCR is still in active (but infrequent) use. I wrote a little script to generate VCR+ codes directly from MythTV listings and I program the VCR weeks in advance.