I've been looking at exactly this issue this last week. I have a logo with a gradient and a small border outline for increased legibility. I'd much rather do this in html/css than as an image, but I'm going with an image for now since these text features are a moving target.

I agree the examples are a little garish, but if you look around, most logos are some mix of these attributes (font, stroke, fill). And it would be much easier (for me) to resize and update logos in html/css than to have to supply 3 or more versions every time I need to create or update a logo.