The transmission used in that application was a plain old slush-box... the only difference being that you can force the thing to upshift. With most automatic transmissions, you can force a downshift(by moving the gear selecter lever to a lower gear), but you can't force it to upshift or hold a gear. The system used in the MR2 allows the driver to control what gear the transmission is in. However, the ECU won't let the driver run the engine over redline or stop in a gear higher than first.

There are cars out there that have a true manual transmission that will shift/engage the clutch itself, but I've never heard of one in a car in a car costing less than $100,000. Aston Martin, Ferarri, and Lamborghini offer vehicles with automatic shifting manuals.

In other words, there probably wouldn't be much benefit other than being able to make the trasmission hold a gear for crawling... but you can do that anyway by putting the gear selector into the first gear position. (would you want to crawl in any other gear?)