Yes, I think it was designed in particular for determining addresses of fields within structures and variables on the stack, for example if you had:

    struct foo
    {
       int field1;
       int field2[10];
    }

Then an access like:

    fooptr->field2[index]

Would compile to:

    fooptr + sizeof(int) * index + offsetof(struct foo, field2)

Which is:

    lea $4(fooptr,index,4)