Although the spec says the pReserved pointer is reserved, there are some tokens that make use (and sort-of depend on being able to get an initialization string through that interface.
Softokn from the NSS project and also Kryoptic can be initialized that way, and although they both can use also environment variables to pass the same info, it is often easier (especially in testing environments) to just pass a string straight to the C_Initialize call.