I asked Paul Irish if he knew anything about it, he wasn't sure either but says it's not completely implemented yet and pointed me at the bug tracker, I found the head ticket and looking at some of the code the diffs have a lot of FIXME: To be implemented. comments.
Bookmarklets - all of your bookmarklets could be stored as snippets, especially those you may wish to edit.
Utilities - debugging helpers for interacting with the current page can be stored and debugged. A community-curated list of such utilities is available.
Debugging - Snippets offer a multi-line console with syntax-highlighting and persistance, making it convenience for debugging code that is more than a one-liner.
Monkey-patching code - code you wish to patch at runtime can be done through Snippets, although many times you can just live-edit code in the Sources tab.
To run snippets quickly, now you can do this. Ctrl-Shift-P for the "command palette", then backspace, and use a ! prefix, then type whichever snippet name you want to run.