Nature (the multidisciplinary journal) should not be confused with other Nature publications that have the name "Nature" in them, like Nature Neurscience or Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology.
H-index is also applied and calculated to publications (Journal h-index). IMHO It fits better to the multidisciplinary nature of the journals than other impact factors.
>some reserachers need the prestige factor. But
In academia things like Nobel price, Abel price, Turing price are signals of significance for those not in the field. They are usually received very late in career.
If you have several publications in Nature, the prestige level approaches those awards and you get the prestige when you are still active researcher. You get tenure or funding for research group. The value can be measured in millions.
* Nips, icml, iclr for all ML folk * Cvpr, iccv for vision * Nacl for nlp * Siggraph for graphics
So on and so forth.
I wonder how nature finds reviewers for ML papers , given its generic nature. Even ML researchers themselves have been struggling to give good reviews in the aforementioned top conferences. I can't imagine how the reviewers at Nature could appropriately review papers of the same quality.
Friend of mine recently published a paper in Nature on quantum computing. There is immense prestige in doing so.