I'm using an ice40 FPGA to make a camera. It reads an image from an image sensor, writes it to an SDRAM, and then writes the SDRAM content to an SD card. Doing all that with a regular CPU would require lots of specialized peripherals (especially since the data rate is 1.2 Gbps -- 12 bits per pixel @ 100 MHz). An FPGA can handle all the requirements quite well.