It does this rather well, when compared to the time and cost tradeoffs of other methods. It also isn't as impressive as, say, some hot-swappable hard drives or tape drives with arbitrarily large capacity, and isn't necessarily superior to simply FTP'ing or otherwise transferring the files over a fast network. However, the Zip 100 does have advantages over these other methods of file transfer. With the parallel port Zip drive, you can not only take your data around in 100MB chunks, but you can take the drive with you as well - install a couple of drivers, and you're off and running. You can also do this with the USB version of the Zip drive, but with older computers that don't have a USB port, you're out of luck - but every machine has a printer port.
Floppies are also portable, but inefficient due to their small storage capacity.
Tapes offer the same portability, but often with other drawbacks - many computers don't have compatible tape drives, or they're difficult to install on the go. Like wise with removable hard drives - the host computer needs a special port and driver software. That, and your target computer has to be connected. The same doesn't go for the drives, though. If I get details on this, I'll post them here.