this could be useful when you want to tile same model a lot of times.

like you dont need to create same model 16 times for 4x4 tile, you can do this by scaling 1 model and just tile the texture.Positive effect on performance.
(though, when i first saw this topic, i thought this was done to achieve this. -i guess someone was making a rpg-maker, maybe this can be useful???-)

scaling uv's can olsa be another approach, though i dont know how it is done.