In my opinion, that statement in the documentation doesn't make sense. It should say "... returns the Laplace transform of the output that results ...." Or it should say, ".. . returns the transfer functions from the nith input to the ouputs."
Regardless, the "modern" approach would be to form an lti system object
sys = ss(A,B,C,D);
and then use functions like step() or impulse() or lsim() to get system response to inputs of interest.