and phone does it all, plus being portable on-the-go

Yes and we even did all these things before a phone and life was fine. The question wasn't if I use the Echo to do things that are impossible otherwise.

I cook a lot and I find it a lot easier to just say "Alexa set a chicken timer for 15 minutes" or "Alexa add black pepper" than it is to get out my phone and do those things.

agreed -- being able to verbally set timers is very valuable to me. Also I have Lifx bulbs in my living room and it is much easier to tell Alexa to turn them on/off/change brightness than it is to get out my phone. I only use the phone app for that when I want to set up some custom color thing (which is pretty rare tbh)