Gemfile, the asset pipeline: Why have the group :assets in your Gemfile?

Heroku, as shown here -
http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails31_heroku_cedar - shows a
Gemfile
in which the following exists:

Asset template engines

group :assets do
gem ‘sass-rails’, “~> 3.1.0.rc”
gem ‘coffee-script’
gem ‘uglifier’
end

I don’t understand why these gems are grouped. Why not omit the group
:assets do … end? What does this do, exactly?

I’m asking because something really peculiar happened: I get the “Sass
Syntax Error: File to import not found or unreadable…” when the
imports *
definitely* should work. When I remove the group :assets, run “bundle
install”, and then check rails server, the imports work fine again. And
here’s the oddest of all: when I revert my Gemfile back to having the
group
:assets as above, and then run rails server - the imports still work
although my Gemfile was back to what it was when the imports didn’t
work.
Thoughts appreciated.

(Btw, I use Rails 3.1rc4, and I’m trying to deploy to Heroku asap)

You don’t need this gems in production