I am working on organizing a grad conference, and am planning on presenting at a grad confernce in the near future. Floating around both of these conferences is the idea that they are good because they will "put a line on your cv." (God, the process of padding the cv just gets earlier and earlier...)

I wonder how useful this approach is, and whether grad conferences really hold that much weight in the larger academic world. Are they recognized as an important step in the transition from student to scholar, or are they (in all honesty) dismissed as a chance for a bunch of nervous grad students to get together and present boring papers that lack the same intellectual rigour as a 'real' conference? Is it a bit of both?