say you use a bunch of proceedurals to come up with a killer texture for something. Surface baking allows you to create a texture map from that, and save itout as a jpg, psd or whatever.. then you won;t need that complex node setup next time, and can enhance/modify that in the 2d graphics app of your choice.

or bake ao or ibl on your object in poser, and then use that as a texture base, or overlay for another texture.

surface baking is in all major 3d applications,and when you think about it, the application is already setup to "look" at all the surfaces, and computer them for a render.. add a little more math, and you've got it readily available as a texture map.

Way too many people take way too many things way too seriously.