Josh and I were working with a batch of resources this afternoon, and we had to rename them all to match a particular specification (by prepending each filename with a string).
We didn't want to use the Finder to manually rename each file, so Josh was trying to remember enough shell scripting to get the job done, finally resorting to renaming them individually via Terminal in duplicated mv afilename prefix_afilename format.
Just for kicks, I fired up Automator to see how long it would take to work out a Workflow to do the same task. It took me 15 seconds. It would have taken maybe another 5 seconds to actually run the script (by selecting the files in Finder, and hitting "Run"). He wasn't done for another few minutes (his primary machine, which was housing the files, was still running Panther. It's been upgraded since :-) )
Workflows are so simple to whip up that I didn't even bother to save it - quicker (and more fun) to create it from scratch next time than to find the saved workflow file...