Question on sustained spells Options

[Blizz]

This may seem glaringly obvious to the rest of you, especially veterans of earlier editions, but when a sustaining a spell does the caster suffer a -2 dice pool penalty to magical tests, or ALL tests? From page 174 of the SR4 book, "While sustained spells do offer the opportunity to have an ongoing magical effect they are also draining on the magician's magical abilities." To me this implies that sustaining a spell would only affect magical tests, however the very next sentence "For each sustained spell the magician maintains, she suffers a -2 dice penalty on all other tests." does not discriminate between magical and nonmagical tests. Page 173 also states that sustained spells are a distraction and incur a -2 dice penalty to all tests, so it would seem that no distinction is made between magical and nonmagical tests. However, if that's the case then what's the point of all these buff spells? Take for example the Combat Mage on page 90. To compete with any cybered character he's probably going to need both Increase Reflexes and Armor up, but would good does that really do him if he's now suffering a -4 to every single test he makes? Not only will he have a hard time hitting anything he'll also be unlikely to avoid any blows at all. Also, unless he got 4 or more success on that Armor spell he's actually suffering a penalty to Damage Resistance tests. In short this unfortunate combat mage is worse off then when he started in everything but Initiative Passes (which I realize are a pretty big deal, but the Street Sam has his extra IPs at no penalty other than essence loss). Was it really the game designers' intention that buffs are basically unusable without those expensive sustaining foci or constantly rebinding spirits to maintain spells?