Doesn't sound like it to me. Researching a topic can be a lot of effort, while typing is easy, even with occasional rephrasing. Hell, even with constant rephrasing it's not very hard.
Having a student sit there and type out, word for word, a decent essay on the subject is probably fairly effective education for a LOT of subjects.
In the same vein that letting students write calculator programs to do the quadratic formula for them during a test is actually a pretty good way to get them to learn the quadratic formula.
It's not an exact equivalent to the intent of an essay today - from an education perspective - but it's not a complete miss either.
