There are some situations where you'll wish you had one.

If your Chromebook does not boot into the operating system anymore, you can create a recovery USB flash drive and use it to reinstall a copy of Chrome OS on your computer. Google provides a tool ...

I'm still using Mac OS X 10.6.8 but will probably update to OS Lion soon. Can someone detail the best way to prepare a USB boot/recovery drive? I've read that you can download it from the Mac App ...

I think the reason we haven't heard many complaints about the doing away of physical media is exactly this. As long as power users can make their own offline media, there's nothing to complain about.