In my experience, albeit short professionally, a project manager is someone that schedules a bunch of meetings and talks to the development team and the client...A LOT.

Of course, the problem occurs when the meetings talking about what "needs to be done" take too much time from actually "doing something". Then the Project Manager turns into Sherlock Holmes trying to figure out why the project isn't moving at the desired pace (which of course constitutes having ANOTHER meeting about why we are going to miss the deadline). It never occurs to him/her that if they wouldn't keep pulling you from your desk, you'd have plenty of time to actually work on the project and meet (possibly even before) the deadline.

In regards to your question about them asking about technical capabilities. In a lot of organizations, senior developers wear several hats, and one of those hats is project leader/manager. This is so some business school graduate doesn't come along and promise clients a system that will massage their feet while retrieving the requested data. Non-techies have a BAD habit of promising things to clients, giving dates, then just dumping it into the laps of developers. Leaving us to simply "deal with what was promised".