In other words, this can be compared to do the computation manually, but with the guarantee that whoever is performing the computation cannot glean anything from it.

This can be OK for some relatively rare and important computations, which you for some reason must run in a software-untrusted environment. I can imagine using it for some high-stakes, small-scale automated voting. All the intermediate results may be posted in the encrypted form as an audit trail. After the process is completed and results are declared, the encryption keys are released, and any party can check that every step of the computation determining the winner was correct, there was no stuffing.