This method is intended for use in places that cannot be reached with opaque pointers, or part of deprecated methods. This makes it easier to see that some uses of getPointerElementType() don't need further action.
I would also like to deprecate PointerType::getElementType() in favor of Type::getPointerElementType() in a followup. The PointerType::getElementType() method is annoying in that you cannot see at a glance whether this is actually accessing a pointer element type, a vector element type or an array element type. I'd like to reduce our TODO list to grep getPointerElementType.
Given where this should be used, should all uses be required to be documented with a FIXME/TODO/SOMETHING to indicate which of the two cases it is?
I don't feel strongly (up to you), but it might make it easier to audit them.