I guess radioshack wins some cool points for taking it to an extreme like that.
However, (going off on a tangent) they definitely lose some cool points if you actually read the documentation for the format of their serial communication with those meters... rather than simply sending the reading as some basic ASCII characters or something (so they'd be really easy to use on the receiving end), they literally send the status of all the display segments, with each of the possible display segments representing one bit, sent as a big string of bytes. Then you have to receive all that crap, pick out the bits you need, decode it to get the actual digits and figure out the range and measurement type (current, voltage, resistance, etc), and then finally be able to do something useful with it.