In addition to being able to render into an on-screen window using OpenGL
ES 2.0, you can also render into nonvisible off-screen surfaces called
pbuffers (short for pixel buffer). Pbuffers can take full advantage of any hardware
acceleration available to OpenGL ES 2.0, just as a window does.
Pbuffers are most often used for generating texture maps. If all you want to
do is render to a texture, we recommend using framebuffer objects (covered
in Chapter 12, “Framebuffer Objects”) instead of pbuffers because they are
more efficient. However, pbuffers can still be useful for some cases where
framebuffer objects cannot be used, such as when rendering an off-screen
surface with OpenGL ES and then using it as a texture in another API such
as OpenVG.
[source : OpenGL ES 2.0 programming guide]
I hope this helps. Read this carefully - "pbuffers can still be useful for rendering to an off-screen surface with OpenGL ES"