Hi Ed,
The purpose of profiles is to allow you to save any consistently used information so it can be quickly loaded into the lister page at the beginning of creating your listings. Also, if a seller offers a variety of product classifications that each use different sets of consistent information, he/she can create a different master profile for each of those product classifications.
As you've pointed out, you can accomplish just about the same thing by creting each new listing from a previously saved listing but then, when creating new listings, you begin with a completed listing of a different product rather that just the consistent information that was entered in the particular master profile.
We plan on introducing some bulk editing tools as part of our Phase II release, which is tentatively scheduled for Q1 of 2007.
-Mike