Just taking the first examples from the Haskell wiki:

    sum = foldr (+) 0
    foldr (f . g) e

rather than

    sum' xs = foldr (+) 0 xs
    foldr f' e
      where f' a b = f (g a) b

The idea is that you define loads of tiny functions at higher order, like the sum example, and these are very simple and easy to maintain because every function is a one-liner. I don't know how to respond to the complaint that the example is just syntactic, because it's fundamentally a syntactic construct (at least unless we get to the point of e.g. summing a list of functions to get their composition): the pointfree style is completely equivalent to the pointed style, it's just argued to be a less noisy syntax, that therefore increases readability and maintainability.