I'm guessing no one working for an IT hardware manufacturer has ever experienced the joy of going through a large business with a PDA to inventory all forms of IT hardware, from monitors, printers, towers, to routers, racks of thin servers, etc.
It would be very nice if all hardware manufacturers would adopt a standard practice of putting the serial number and model number (preferably with a barcode) on the front of every piece of hardware, and design the hardware itself so that this is not a problem (no blocking airflow and whatnot). Also leave a spot in this same area for a barcode created by the hardware buyer. No two companies use the same type of information or data capture system, but generally the model number, serial number and the company's own internal barcode number seem to be fairly standard for tracking hardware inventory.
This would not be difficult to achieve by any means.
PS I don't advocate using RFID because: A) I believe any security system you devise to prevent a competitor engaging in corporate espionage in an windowless van in your parking will be eventually overcome; barcodes won't be intercepted B) It is in the realm of possibilities that as the amount of wireless devices in the world exponentially increases the corresponding amount of electromagnetic radiation is damaging to agricultural crops (read books on biodynamics for a perspective on this)
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Why roam around from machine to machine zapping a barcode? Why not do it all over your network? Do check out DMI. There are also tools to pull information on all of the PCI cards, USB devices, drives, and even monitors that are on a system. Combine it with SNMP and/or a web interface and there's no reason to step away from your workstation.
On Linux, tools to play with are dmidecode, lspci, lsusb, ddcprobe, {get,read}-edid, the /proc tree, and the /sys tree.