I have seen a bastardized version of Django admin used as a quite sophisticated dashboard. This new addition will make it even easier to hack together things like that in a very short time.
One of my first Django projects was to “bastardize” its admin into a Lead/Opportunity management system for a mortgage broker, back in the version 0.96 days. I know that monkey-patching is now frowned upon and reguarded as “the work of the devil” but it really helped me get the job done for that project in a pretty reasonable amount of time. I hope dynamic programming makes a come-back.
This is a surprisingly pretty common practice. I know people, even at Google, who want the ease of CMS but additional control.
There were always ways to get read only in the admin. Just not nicely. It shouldn’t have been holding you back though.
This will make it a lot easier to build internal admin dashboards that are safe to share with non-privileged users like support staff.