One of elektra main points is to make the life of an admin much easier. On single Workstations the configuration keys will be stored locally and editable - as the situation was before.
On Desktop System the Admin will mainly benefit from elektra that it is possible to have your favourite configuration format system wide, the CommandlineTool which makes it possible to request and change all keys and the often missed dumping and restoring of the whole configuration or parts of it.
For things you are not used to configurate you might be happy to see more graphical or web-based configuration systems, because this becomes much easier to implement with a common API.
But on larger networks it is required that configuration for every computer can be changed at one place. This could be of course done by an exported /etc, but once you want other configuration for specific systems and sometimes exceptions for various computers it will get really messy.
With elektra it will be technically possible to write a server program which gives configuration to every computer regarding your needs. You can configure every client to get configuration from a configuration-server. This can be e.g. a SQL server which holds a default configuration, configuration for groups of computers and exceptions for various computers.
