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Basically all it is doing is taking into account that your computer monitor has a gamma curve on it (around 2.2 for a crt and nearer to 1.0 for an lcd) and you are taking that gamma curve into account. What the monitor gamma is doing is darkening your mid and shadow colours and people tend to correct this by turning up the lights in a scene and burning everything out. What they should be doing is applying the reverse gamma curve of their monitor so that the mid tones and shadows come back to their true brightness.
As for where the 2.2 thing comes from, it's just a figure that seems to suit the majority of crt monitors - most of them have a gamma of around 2.2 (some slightly higher, some slightly lower) but it seems to be a good overall figure for most crts. 2.2 isn't a magical number by any means though and you could calibrate your monitor to nearly any gamma and still get the linear workflow to work. The really important thing is actually knowing exactly what gamma your monitor is at so that you know what value you need to counteract. If you wanted to you could calibrate your monitor to a gamma of 4.0 and then apply the reverse of that to counteract it, but what this would do is take your monitor really far away from it's default range of colours and you'd possibly end up losing colour detail in your display (kind of like applying a really harsh colour correction on something in photoshop.)
Lcd monitors on the other hand have a gamma that's almost 1 in the first place so it's a better idea to calibrate them to gamma 1.0 rather than 2.2 as otherwise you'd be again pushing them really far from their normal operating range.
It's possibly being over complicated in a way since everyone has a different understanding of how it works and a different way of explaining it that makes sense to them - This leads to loads of people talking about the same thing in different ways and making the entire thing seem a lot more complicated than it really is.
As for where the 2.2 thing comes from, it's just a figure that seems to suit the majority of crt monitors - most of them have a gamma of around 2.2 (some slightly higher, some slightly lower) but it seems to be a good overall figure for most crts. 2.2 isn't a magical number by any means though and you could calibrate your monitor to nearly any gamma and still get the linear workflow to work. The really important thing is actually knowing exactly what gamma your monitor is at so that you know what value you need to counteract. If you wanted to you could calibrate your monitor to a gamma of 4.0 and then apply the reverse of that to counteract it, but what this would do is take your monitor really far away from it's default range of colours and you'd possibly end up losing colour detail in your display (kind of like applying a really harsh colour correction on something in photoshop.)
Lcd monitors on the other hand have a gamma that's almost 1 in the first place so it's a better idea to calibrate them to gamma 1.0 rather than 2.2 as otherwise you'd be again pushing them really far from their normal operating range.
It's possibly being over complicated in a way since everyone has a different understanding of how it works and a different way of explaining it that makes sense to them - This leads to loads of people talking about the same thing in different ways and making the entire thing seem a lot more complicated than it really is.
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