Personally, I find working within tmux more productive than a vanilla terminal, even if I never touch the remote functionality.

This was probably due to being used to using terminator on xubuntu, which tmux has felt similar to for me, and because I prefer having something I can configure/script and commit to a repo. I think it's a bit like preferring awesomewm or xmonad over, say, Gnome or KDE.

In addition to that, this sort of thing is just nice, I think.