I built this to scratch my own itch and its also a really simple use case to illustrate the ability to control real world devices with DTMF tones. Some Twilio projects I had in mind when I built this include Buzzeromatic.com, which is also powered by Twilio and costs $1.95/month and had a very public launch. Sunlight Labs also did a door hack with Twilio and an arduino that I thought was pretty sweet.
What I think is important is that what I've built doesn't have any UI or anything like that, just a really stripped down version and I'm not looking to make it into some paid service. You could certainly take these guts and turn them into a kickass product, but these <100 lines of PHP are not the defensible secret sauce.
The ability to use DTMF tones with Twilio has been around for awhile, I got the tone generator from a Get Satisfction thread that's about a year old: http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/dtmf_tone_generatio...