Interesting. I think your point is generally good but that phone numbers is an example against it. I tend to document stuff using the second approach, because I'm documenting for lookup. Phone numbers are a case in point - I always have it in front of me on a scrap of paper, but want to enter it into the appropriate page and place of our wiki where I or a colleague will be able to quickly recall it later. I'm creating it with the lookup in mind.

Whereas if I'm opening a document just to play around with ideas I won't be doing that, and most documents start that way. I think this is why Word has so far won the field in mainstream document production. Word is a superb tool for prototyping and terrible in almost every aspect of structuring data for its long-term use.