I don't know what the OP has in mind, but we recently started working with some embedded system devices. Our device of choice has no clock battery at all, so every time you power up the clock must be reset. These devices are intended to be used remotely over the internet, so first thing it does is start openvpn to create a secure network to it. But without a reasonably close clock, openvpn won't even validate. So we use rdate just after the network starts to grab time off one of our servers.

Mind you we don't run Perl on our device, but I image there are plenty of real world situations where you just don't have a proper time to start with.