For starters, if it can be induced externally without shoving wires into your brain, it could conceivably be a safer, more reliable form of surgical anesthesia. Even with "anesthesiologist" being a dedicated career path, botched anesthesia kills more people than we'd like to admit, plus there's the rare-but-horrific surgical awareness cases. Even if it can't be induced by (say) an external magnetic field, a minimally-invasive implant might be provided to a patient who's expected to need repeated surgeries.

Also, as the article points out, reversing the process could potentially be useful in awakening coma patients.

Of course all that's very speculative, and more research is called for, but that's how science is done.