I'm sorry, are you asking for what purpose a scientist would need to multiply by a power of ten? Converting between units in scientific notation? Doing base 10 logarithms? Calculating things in decibels?
The original post that started this thread was saying that chips should support decimal floating point natively in silicon instead of only base-2 floating point. Yes, those are different things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE754#Basic_formats
Maybe I have misunderstood the question.