an important additional feature of being able to call initialize Gantry and get Gantry template parameters from components, overrides, plugins, and modules.
Basically, it allows you to initialize Gantry in an component, (or html override for a component) and use it to get parameters set by the template and use them to control aspects of layout or anything you want to control based on template params.
All you have to do is add
global $gantry;
require_once(JPATH_ROOT."/components/com_gantry/gantry.php");
$whatever = $gantry->get('whatever');