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Unless we go after the specifics in front of us especially in doing portraits we miss the minor things that make folks recognizable. All humans can ID an old friend from great distances, we are very good at seeing those small things that added together mean total identity. To do any thing else (than to see and paint these)is to paint a somewhat generic portrait, which is too often just a conglomeration of presumations and looks weak very naturally.
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Yea, but Tim, portraiture and figure work also involves anatomy and understanding the proportions and human anatomy can really help you to paint a better portrait - and a beginning student needs to have some way of translating what they see from their eye to their hand - measuring is one way of doing that.
Further, a good understanding of anatomy will definitely help you if you want to do work from your imagination (i.e., figures in action - falling, running, jumping, etc.) - not something that you will have much luck getting a model into let alone holding it for 9 hours - talk about hang time!
While I agree with you that rarely will you meet someone who will conform to these anatomical measurements, they can be useful for beginners to better place features. The thing to understand is that your subject is a person and not just a measurement - thereby, use your measuring to get things rolling, but then you need to refine and really capture what you are seeing. That is where the real work is.
Try drawing children....AAARRRRGGGG!!! Talk about non-conforming features!