Two of the homebrewers I know best, Danny of Deeper Roots and Chris of Lewy Brewing, seem to prefer kegging to bottling. I think they feel like it takes a lot less effort to put a beer in a single keg than 50 bottles, and it's probably a thrill to be able to pour a pint of your own homebrew out of a tap. I remember Danny saying, also, that getting the right level of carbonation was easier with a keg--you just set the pressure and wait a week, instead of trying to guesstimate with priming sugar amounts and conditioning time. I've never had the opportunity to keg any of my beers--and I'm not expecting to have the opportunity anytime soon--so I can't really speak to its merits from personal experience. But the main reason I haven't kegged a beer is this: I like bottling.
I like bottling for a lot of reasons. First of all, I like the fact that I don't have to buy, maintain, and store kegging equipment. I'm a cheapskate at heart, and when I can get something for free, it makes me happy. So far no one has offered me a free keg, or any of the other equipment running a keg requires, but empty bottles are easy to come by. I can usually get enough for a batch of beer just by talking to a few friends on Sunday afternoon. And bottles, when they're packed in their boxes and the boxes are stacked up, don't take all that much room to store, and don't need to be refrigerated.
Another thing I like about bottling is how low tech it is. You don't need extra tubing and valves and custom refrigerators, and a semi-permanent place to set that all up. The most esoteric piece of equipment you need is a bottle capper, and you can get one for $10 bucks and be set for life. Bottle caps and priming sugar (I usually use dried malt extract) are cheap too, and easy to come by. If you're out of priming sugar, you can always borrow a cup of table sugar from your neighbor, but chances are they won't have a tank of CO2.
Bottles themselves are a pretty beautiful thing, too. It might take a bit of work to get them ready for use the first time (stripping off the labels, and cleaning out any mold if they weren't properly cleaned when you got them), but after that initial prepping all it takes is a quick rinse right after pouring out the contents, and then a quick dip in sanitizing solution right before refilling. And you can keep using them again and again. In San Francisco I had bottles that got reused with more than 30 different batches of beer!
Since the bottles are cheap (i.e. free), there's no reason not to give them away to friends and family, which gives you an opportunity to share beers with people that don't have the time or inclination to stop by and drink from your keg. You can bring a few bottles along to parties and other places too--transporting a bottle of homebrew is way more convenient than transporting a keg and keg system.
Having mentioned some of the more practical reasons for bottling, allow me to get a bit more far out. With a keg all of your batch goes into a single place (unless you're using extra small kegs), and then you keep pulling from that same body of beer. With bottles, each individual bottle becomes its own world; the living yeast continue in their life cycle, each bottle a different colony. You get a chance to observe changes, and experience uniqueness, with every bottle. You can age them longer, age them in different conditions (cooler or warmer, or maybe stick one in sunlight to try for that Heineken effect), or even add specific things to specific bottles (like throw some raisins in one, or prime different bottles with different sugars). The possibilities are endless.
And since I'm on the topic of bottling, here's one thing I've learned just since having moved to Hawaii: the labels on Kona Brewing bottles are pretty easy to peel off, just soak the bottle for an hour or so first. (Sierra Nevada labels used to be easy to get off too, but they seem to be a bit tougher now that the label has changed).
You make some excellent points, I must say. I especially like the idea of a bottle's contents maturing in its own space and becoming something unique because of that. You're right about me hating bottling, though (I may have even used the word "despise" in a post at some point). To be more exact it's the process I dislike. The results are always satisfying, to be sure. I've been bottling more beers as I make sours and barleywines and other beers that just don't lend themselves to kegging and there can be something cathartic about it if you're in the right mindset.
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