They're part of what we might call the divide between "cycling" and "riding a bicycle." The cycling hobby is mostly about go-fast or go-far for its own sake, but in much of the world a bicycle is just transportation. In those places, you trade away efficiency or speed or weight in favor of the "it just works forever" bulletproof-ness that the enclosed hub provides.
(The latter is such a severe design error that I think no one should purchase the Bosch+Rohloff system until or unless it gets fixed. Use something else. An ebike is not a car, and it should be operable as a rider-powered bicycle even in the event of an electrical fault.)
My road bike has SRAM eTap on it. It's beautiful, sleek, and shifts perfectly almost every time. BUT that performance starts to suffer if I let the drive train get dirty, especially if I let gunk accumulate on the jockey wheels.
Your Sturmey can be ridden without such concerns. I mean, I'd never be able to keep up on my group rides on it, but for a general use bicycle it's probably superior.