The important bit is that this is THE core abstraction used in node and the node community. If for no other reason, you should do it (if you're using node) because it's how you hook into the existing libraries.

The main benefit here isn't that it's possible to do this thing, as many people pointed out the myriad ways this is accomplished elsewhere. The key point is that everything that manipulates data, node core as well as the userland libraries, implement the same interface.