If you need names for intermediate results, etc. then you don't want the pipeline operator/function. In such cases the things you say are true. But when you wan't to be more concise, with the operator/function, you can.

BTW A nice feature of a code editor would be if you could magically switch back and forth between code with intermediate named variables and pipelined version of the same code, e.g. by selecting the code and invoking an option.