Jake,
I expect the reviews all focus on long range stuff because that's the unique part of the feature set for its price - it has a remarkably long range, and remarkably far non-reflective range for its price point.
But it does have to work at short ranges too. It has two modes, like most laser RF's these days, Line Of Sight "LOS" which is the true distance to the target, and Angle Modified Range "AMR" which does angular correction. AMR only really makes sense at shorter ranges for most guys, unless you're mountain hunting.
Compared to my Bushnell units, it's a lot faster, and will come into short ranges a lot better. I have trouble getting down to 5yrds on my Bushnells, usually only 7-8yrds will read. The Sig reads down to about 4.6yrds reliably - which is something I never noticed I didn't have in other units; Decimal places!! Playing with it tonight, it read 9.4yrds to the wall, and 8.3yrds to the front of my work bench - which is 40" deep (1.11yrds). My wife measured it out with a 100ft tape for me and she got 28' 4" from the wall to the front of the unit (should have been 28' 2.5", maybe Mrs. Mercy slacked the tape a bit), so best we can tell, it's accurate to within a few inches at short ranges.
One thing I wish it DID have, although I never use it, so I can't say it matters - on my Bushnell units even, the angle corrected display outputs the corrected range, the angle, and the line of sight range, all in one display. It's a boatload of info and can be confusing if you're not used to the Bushnell display, and I only ever use the angle corrected range anyway, but it'd sure be nice if SIG included at least the angle on the AMR display. It's fast enough to change back and forth between LOS and AMR, I don't think it'll be much of an issue in the field if I ever decide I need both, instead of just the corrected range.
The autobrightness AND manual brightness option is nice. The auto seems to work really well so far, but it's nice to be able to modify the brightness manually if I want.