Many of these are places where people are caching rasterizations of deep layer hierarchies to avoid paying the compositing cost on a per-frame basis. But if you do that with drawRect:, you're using the CPU (not the GPU); if you use your own images, you're on the hook for your own caching, which you're likely to mess up. Such cases should probably use -[CALayer setShouldRasterize:] instead.

For more about this stuff, check out the two WWDC sessions I mentioned above.