Agreed.  And it's excellent for designing and troubleshooting.  It is, however, a bit difficult to automate if you're dealing with unknown inputs that are present in the Temp Table because you used SELECT/INTO to create the Temp Table and you need your code to be able to read the results so that it may make decisions about the data based on meta-data in the Temp Table. 

As a bit of a sidebar, I think that its a shame that MS doesn't have a separate extended procedure that can actually be used to return an easily consumable meta-data table about any table.