Blind Tasting – Why?

The wine world seems to have something of an obsession with blind tasting – surely this is a fairly pointless skill.  In the real world when do you ever need to identify a wine blind?  The bottles have a nice helpful label on the front.  Sure, I can see the need to describe a wine to a customer, and to be able to identify faults, but to guess what it is and where it’s from is just a game, nothing more, and I believe should be removed from professional qualifications.