Imagine if that weren't there. What if someone tricked you into signing a Bitcoin transaction with your key? They could put the signature they got from you along with your public key into the input script for the transaction, and broadcast that transaction to the network. (Unless something I'm not aware of would prevent that.)

Granted, it would be somewhat difficult to trick someone into doing that (Bitcoin transactions include null chars, and I don't think you can copy-paste those) but why take the risk at all?

Imagine if that weren't there. What if someone tricked you into signing a Bitcoin transaction with your key? They could put the signature they got from you along with your public key into the input script for the transaction, and broadcast that transaction to the network. (Unless something else I'm not aware of would prevent that.)

Granted, it would be somewhat difficult to trick someone into doing that (Bitcoin transactions include null chars, and I don't think you can copy-paste those) but why take the risk at all?