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While looking for this, I was a bit confused because of the several different queries that I came up with.
Queries such as "How to display a component's output", or "How to get article's body" have the same goal; extract an article's body (i.e. the content of an article) without all that code that Joomla! generates (menu, header, logo, footer, sidebars etc.).

The most obvious reason for this is to take the content of an article and place it somewhere else than the main content area.

This is similar to the index2.php functionality, which is depreciated since 1.5.

The functionality of index2.php was applied to components in general, and not only to articles. This one seems to do exactly the same (due to the "component" parameter), but I haven't tested it yet.