"I was just settling down with my book and I felt the airplane do a very odd maneuver. We could feel the airplane doing something very significant and abnormal."[1][2]

Human brains are amazing things that, with no special effort - only practice and repetition - can combine a huge number of disparate inputs to synthesize the "feel" of something.

The airplane is a physical thing and it has "a feel". A good pilot (or jockey or surgeon or fighter or truck driver) has a tremendous amount of stored information and experience related to "the feel" of what they are doing. We would be vastly worse off (and less safe) if we discounted that human ability and fooled ourselves into believing that simulation can ever match the experience of doing a thing in the physical world.

[1] http://jalopnik.com/5629528/how-i-saved-a-747-from-crashing

Completely putting aside the question of the quality of the simulation of the aircraft and physics involved, one possible reason is that simulations can remove extreme emotions from the equation. The pilot knows they won't die in the simulator if they make an error. (This can be both a positive and negative gain.)

To take it to the extreme, would you be willing to attempt landing a real 747 solo, having only ever flown using simulators?