First, you seem to think I was answering a slightly different question - "In what circumstances should I make the decision to write assembly?" The question I was answering was closer to "When people need to write assembly, why?"
The actual question, of course, was not quite either of those.
Also, addressing a point of ambiguity:
I did not mean "hardware access ([this is something that is] not exposed by other languages)" - that is, in general, wrong.
I meant "hardware access ([when the particular thing is] not exposed by other languages)". This includes SSE (though that is starting to be included as builtins in some compilers). Outside of SSE, I grant that there isn't much on x86 platforms that is relevant to a game, since games on x86 platforms typically run under an OS. It can be relevant if you're writing a driver, though. And this can vary substantially by platform.
And no, it's not a good reason to write an entire program in assembly unless a sufficient percentage of your program is calls to these things that the C inlines are just adding cruft.
"On the other hand, building small, standalone executable file that use very little (stack) memory is still relevant for programs that run on very small (usually embedded) hardware. Especially when they need to run fast or to have low energy consumption. So speed and memory usage are still pretty good reasons to use assembly :)"
No, that is substantially more misleading. Like I said, you cannot quickly do better than a modern compiler, and a compiler does it very, very quick.