If I remember correctly, the SysRq is left over from pre-internet days when communications to the host was done using X.25 or even more primitive protocols. I believe that IBM’s old PROFS management system, which was green characters on a CRT (not a GUI) had you press SysRq to ‘wake up’ the machine and tell it you were about to interact with the mainframe.
It also played some role in switching from one operating system (mainframe) to another on old PCs. (Hence the name SysRq)
Now (2017) it has been coopted, or adapted by Linux to mean something totally different. But historically, to old IBM PC users, it had real use.