Vibration isn't actually a hardware option, that's just to silent notifications. Vibration is actually toggled in the settings.app, so this would just be an easier way to toggle that.
Probably more useful to substitute it for something like cellular data instead though, so perhaps it was a bit of a mistake.
Ah a quick way to turn off vibrate would be so useful. I've been in meetings and had a group iMessage conversation go on with my phone vibrating away noisily.