I think its so you can say stuff like

if (getRef($node)) {
...
}
[download]

and be sure that $node is now indeed a PM $NODE hashref. As I said, this isn't a technique I would probably employ. I'm sure the Everything folks have their reasons, but to me its an odd routine in the first place.

Oh, i should say, that for a lot of PM methods there are functional wrappers, so where the normal $obj->getRef($node) would be written in htmlcode it would be as a plain getRef() call.