If you think it's good enough for a business to pay you money for it, then it's good enough for you to invest in it to the extent of printing it out and paying for postage. Also, since submissions are read out of the office, at home on the editor's own time, the submitter is assuming that the editorial assistant doing the reading is making enough money to afford a computer at home to do it with. This is not a reasonable assumption. When this question has come up online in the past, the consensus among editors has been that the process of manuscript submission works fine for them, and they're not interested in changing it. Yes, it works out that way.
Pitch defines typefaces horizontally, by the number of characters that can fit in an inch.
Point up, pitch across. One problem with pitch vs. point is that, if you have a PostScript printer, the fonts on your menu are defined by point size - Courier 10 point, Courier 12 point. So if you change the printer selection on your PC from the HP Laserjet III with the Post Script option on, you select Courier 12 point. I plan on putting the postage and label in a separate envelope. For the return of your novel, provide a envelope big enough to hold the box your manuscript is in.