Yeah, its usefulness is very limited in vanilla gameplay (outside of "oohh, bit of red" in your grey+yellow+brown factory).
Its original design was focused on modded features (large amours and factorissimo entrances), and its nice to see other usefulness discovered on top of that.
Ironically enough, as of Space Age it gets a couple more "vanilla" features.
One is that its possible to get armors with high runspeeds by using Quality.
The second is that (as I pointed out on the main page) any tile which has a walking speed slower than the hover speed will cause the Mech Armor to switch into hover for a moment. So Slowdown Concrete can be used to trigger hover animations intentionally.
(The example image is my current "City Block" playthrough where I now automatically "jump" between blocks thanks to a ring of Slowdown Concrete)