My impression was that Sean was targeting normal development, where I don't see a real need for this. I did not thing of scripting, there I definitely see the point of some of the parts.
I agree that updating should not be done manually, and we haven't done that for many years. I think we started automating it around 2005 or 2006, first just the database changes since they where so easy to mess up, but we eventually wrote our own update application which does everything needed with just the push of a button. This is pretty complex, and I would not trust a script to handle a "full" update, but for some of the minor tasks a proper scripting support would be nice.