Comment 56 for bug 191889

Basically I agree and with NM 0.7 that's probably almost no issue anymore.
But earlier versions of NM weren't able to manage 3G and all other dialup things.
So people had NM running for their WiFi/cable devices but used other tools to connect with their 3G devices for example. That was a major use case the last two years.
So inventing a hidden pref wouldn't harm and wouldn't be too hard as well.
(I'm not talking about ignoring special devices but just disabling NM status support for special cases)