No, don't be silly.

It means that anyone who's written a task, or read enough of them, has seen this a few times. Nobody would mind if these boilerplate lines were replaced with a helper function, sure, but let's look at our options:
1. Add a new helper and make the tasks in this module use it
2. Add a new helper and make every task in teuthology use it
3. Use the same code other tasks use for now, and do option 2 later

Option 1 adds more inconsistency to the codebase; option 2 is clearly out of scope. I like option 3.