Why play online?

At least a few times a week when I'm playing poker online, somebody else at the table notices that my location is listed as "Las Vegas," and asks, "Why are you playing online?" Apparently these people think that the only reason for playing online is the lack of a convenient brick-and-mortar poker room. I think it should be pretty easy for people to come up with other reasons that one might choose to play online even while living in a city with 50+ poker rooms available 24 hours a day. But since that seems to be beyond a fair number of players, let me list a bunch of them.

• I would like to be a well-rounded poker professional some day. That includes being able to play respectably well online. There are real differences between live play and online play, and it is not trivially easy to apply skills from one arena to the other.
• There are times when even if the casino were right next door I wouldn't feel like going out. Maybe I'm sick. Maybe I'm lazy. Maybe I have insomnia and want to play a game in my underwear until I get sleepy.
• I can accomplish other things while playing online--writing, watching TV, doing email, web surfing, paying bills, etc.
• Conversely, if one is easily bothered by distractions, one can make one's home environment much more suited to intense concentration than a live poker room. Casinos are mostly noisy, busy places with lots of stuff going on. If one has difficulty tuning out the chatter from other players, the constant irritating sound of chip shuffling, the bells and whistles of nearby slot machines, the scantily clad cocktail waitresses, and so on, home might be a better place from which to play serious poker.
• People who are even more bothered by cigarette smoke than I am might hate the casino environment.
• There are many games readily available online that one would be hard-pressed to find being spread live at any Vegas casino. That includes razz. Even if a game like HORSE is being spread somewere in town, it might only be at stakes higher (or lower) than one cares to play.
• Players who are talented at playing many tables at once may well be able to earn far more per hour playing online than they could in a casino.
• One might be too young to legally play live.
• For tournament specialists, there's much less down time between events online, and the sites tend to take less juice than casinos do.
• It's easy to track down specific profitable opponents online. They haven't yet invented a system for doing this in casinos.
• I suppose that for some people the temptations of free alcohol, along with sports betting, craps, blackjack, etc., are too tempting if they enter casinos. (Not a problem for me.)
• People who don't live here tend to underestimate the PITA factor of getting around in this city. Yeah, I know that I'm spoiled, and if your closest casino is a four-hour drive you're not going to have any sympathy. But it's just a fact that from the moment I decide I'd like to play, it's going to be at least 30 minutes before I'm in a game, given the time to get ready to go, drive somewhere, park, walk inside, register, etc. Traffic can be horrendous and totally unpredictable here, and if there is either a traffic jam or a long waiting list for a table, that 30 minutes can easily stretch into an hour. Online, it's rare for it to take more than three minutes from when I decide to play until I'm in a game.

None of the above is intended to suggest that I consider online poker to be superior to live play as a general rule. I don't. For the most part, I find playing live both more enjoyable and more profitable. But playing online has its own distinct pleasures and advantages that are not by any means negated by living in even the most absurdly poker-rich city in the world.