Why not? Having a fancy interface never hurts. OK, lets get serious.
Look at all the Linux Distro's out there. They all use ISOLINUX for creating the bootable CD, and have multiple boot images. If you have a standard machine, all you do is to pick the default image (just hit enter). If your machine has some peripheral which the default image doesn't like, then you will have pass all kinds of parameters to the kernel, so that the kernel doesn't choke. How does the user know the exact information which needs to be passed to kernel? He does not. He usually does a google search, and some linux guru will tell him the exact parameter which needs to go to the kernel.
Here is another reason. You are creating a rescue CD, which has lots of images in them. One to install and troubleshoot each OS you support, one to test the memory, one to test the hard disk.... How does a user know which image to boot from? The current solution is to list all the images in a display message (the important ones if all dont fit) and expect the user to type in the appropriate one.
Yet another reason. Since the menu displaying code is in C, you can write additional C code on top of that. So you can have a menu with 20 items and based on your code you can decide that of the 20 only 10 apply to the machine in question (may be because the machine has only one hard disk, so you cannot boot from the second hard disk). In principle you can customize the menu at run time to your hearts content.
A Text User Interface for GUI (i.e. a menusystem to help you choose which image to boot into). Download tui.tgz to download all required files together, or go here to see the files one at a time. This code has been compiled using the open source Open Watcom compiler for C/C++. Beware: I am no longer maintaining the Open Watcom version of the code. You can see a more powerful version of the code (32-bit code) distributed as part of SYSLINUX.
If you dont like programming, no problem. You can create a config file and let a script write the program for you! Download SYSLINUX and you will see what I mean (see inside the menu directory).
This is much like the menu which comes with LILO or GRUB, except this runs under SYSLINUX (or its derivatives). But unlike LILO and GRUB's menu systems: