One thing Lightroom is good at is auto tone (where other prog's fail miserably). It's not always perfect, but it's a good starting point. I normally hit auto tone + then fine tune it to my liking
I don't go by the auto WB tho', as I haven't liked any of the results + ended up reverting to "as shot" to fine tune from there.
Another area that Lightroom shines is batch processing. This is handy for a shoot where the WB and/or exposure is consistently out, + saves having to process each pic one at a time. Obviously each one may need individual fine tuning, but it does the bulk of the work for you. This is great for a big shoot