Of course, you can make the same point about many other algorithms - graph search, for example.
The nice thing about showing that arbitrary orderings still work is that you can, for example, do parallel sorting with work-stealing, where each thread tries to grab the smallest interval from its working set at each iteration (to minimize space requirements and to improve cache locality), but other threads try to grab the largest interval possible (to reduce the amount of locking as much as possible).
Of course, you can make the same point about many other algorithms - graph search, for example.
The nice thing about showing that arbitrary orderings still work is that you can, for example, do parallel sorting with work-stealing, where each thread tries to grab the smallest interval from its working set at each iteration (to minimize space requirements and to improve cache locality), but other threads try to grab the largest interval possible (to reduce the amount of locking as much as possible).