I pay for a full backup of everything (databases, server files, mailboxes etc) every 24hours which can be rolled back up to one month. It is about £3 a month for each site which I charge my customers for.
I have never used this feature in CI but like all features, I am sure there are people that do use it. However, these features could be considered quite specialised and if, as I am sure you do, there are good reasons to be considering dropping it, then perhaps it might re-emerge as a future feature request or perhaps even as an add-on written by people in the community.
Personally it would not affect me at all.
Paul.