Digital doesn't have to mean sampled or whatever. They're just tools. You can still record straight-up if you want.
The usual argument for vinyl is that some say it has better or warmer sound. From what evidence I've seen, it's an even order distortion and even order ones are "pleasant" (think guitar distortion sounding pleasant despite being a distortion of the true tone of the string). The main thing is that if you sample a vinyl record, people can't tell the real record from the recording of it in double blind tests, so whatever it is that makes it "better "to some people isn't a limitation of the digital medium itself, but something the vinyl changes.
If I have a home theater PC with a blu-ray drive in it set up in my home theater system regardless of a stand-alone blu-ray player and it has a Blu-Ray drive in it, why exactly would I want to buy ANOTHER Blu-Ray stand-alone player if I can have ONE device run ALL of my software (whether on hard drive or disc)? I mean, your argument just turns on itself. Why have and use two when you only need ONE?
As for having it on Macs in general, the list is much more extensive and goes beyond your one little area of concern. For example:
1> I personally don't like disc formats (as in having to go find one disc in a library over 600 discs stacked in racks in another part of the room or the room next to it). This is particularly onerous if one has a larger house with multiple viewing rooms (I have two large music setups, one with a 47" display and the other with a 93" screen; the 47" one is really about the high-end audio using ribbon speakers that did not come in home theater arrangements and being 6 FEET tall, they don't work well with center channels at the very least.) That room is also my music room and where I do a lot of recording with my MBP. The 47" display is mounted on the wall so it doesn't get in the way. It can also double as a monitor display when mixing from a listening position across the room using the ribbon monitors when I record my own music. The 2nd room is a traditional home theater room downstairs with a 6.1 speaker setup and a 93" projector/screen.
I have AppleTV boxes in both rooms (which will soon be 1080p 3rd generation boxes). Why would I want to run Blu-Ray discs between two floors (far more inconvenient than just the back of one of the rooms) when I can DUMP all my Blu-Ray discs onto a giant hard drive RAID array (even without re-compressing if desired) and simply send it over my home network to wherever I want to watch it? I can even put a copy on a notebook and take it with me (which I would HAVE to do with a Mac since they don't support Blu-Ray and even if I'm just talking about a basic DVD, the new Macs don't have drives in them). Either way, I STILL have to dump these discs and that means my computer has to have a BD drive attached to it one way or another (you can dump from a Mac or even watch them from a Mac that has Windows on it). I'd prefer them built-in for convenience sake.
2> Home video (or even professional projects for that matter) are typically in 1080p these days and even IF you don't use BD, your friends very well might and so if you want to send them a copy of your home movie, you will probably need to burn them a Blu-Ray disc. You can't burn it if you don't have a BD compuer writer drive.
3> New MBP models will have Retina resolution displays soon and if I'm on a trip, why wouldn't I want to watch Blu-Ray discs on it? Yeah, I can use a digital version or even a digital compressed version, but if it's from BD, I still need a drive SOMEWHERE to do that. For example, I have USB in my car stereo and so I hardly ever use a CD anymore, but what if I see an album at Best Buy I want (either on CD for uncompressed quality sake or because I want to hear it NOW). If I didn't have the CD drive in my car stereo, I flat out couldn't listen to it right away. I'd have to wait until I got home or to my notebook (but not the NEW Mac notebooks since they have NO drive) and DUMP it and then transfer it to a USB stick and then go back to the car to listen to it there (meanwhile, I might as well just listen to it at home).
I think what really bothers some of us is that Apple isn't using the saved space from removing the drive to put something BETTER in there. They are just making the computer THINNER. Well if I wanted a Macbook Air, I would buy one!
My 2008 MBP is plenty small, thin and light enough. It doesn't need to be light enough to use as a frisbee for god's sake! Why remove USEFUL hardware just to make it like another model? It's just pointless (like making iPhones thinner with new battery tech instead of giving us MORE time with the same size. Look at the new iPad4. I'd rather have an iPad3 with 27 hours of battery life in that case form. I'm not likely to watch a lot of 1080p movies on a freaking iPad. I AM likely to need a lot of battery life on this thing, but Apple doesn't care about that. Frankly, I'm SHOCKED they were willing to make that model thicker even to accommodate a Retina display. I think Steve Jobs would have forbade that if he were alive. The man was obsessed with THIN as you can possibly make it work, no matter the cost and some of us just don't get that at all. A 5 pound notebook is NOT heavy for god's sake. I carried a 30 pound bookbag (with 7+ school books in it plus folders and notebooks, etc.) for many years in college. A 5 pound notebook is nothing.
I guess you don't ever have to go on business trips. I spent 6 weeks STRAIGHT in a hotel last year. It was a nice hotel, but watching 20 cable channels gets old after awhile, particularly since the tv wasn't THAT much larger than a larger notebook, particularly when I had to watch the TV from the bed but I could watch the notebook from a desk chair at a closer distance (and plug in high quality headphones to boot). The TV was SD. An HD movie would have been more pleasant to look at by far, IMO. At least I had over 80 movies with me to watch (on the hard drive).
See reason #1. Even if I have one, that doesn't mean I want to use it, particularly if the quality can be made nearly equal (straight dump). You don't know how NICE it is to be able to access any tv show, movie or photo from a simple menu system until you try it. With DVDs, the quality isn't an issue. It's simple to handle them any way you want from a straight dump with full menus to just the movie file to a high-setting recompress that can be used from AppleTV menus (XBMC will play DVDs straight with menus or without).
