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I don't think PDFs do any good, at all. In my opinion, PDFs are to document formats what MS Windows is to operating systems. Long deprecated, dysfunctional, and only around because society is too rigid to change and embrace better alternatives. On top of that, PDF (which I wouldn't say of Windows, despite being a great opponent of it) are ill-designed from the start.
I don't see any purpose for PDFs, not even the excuses you mention. If you want to store an arbitrary mix of pictures and text, use vectorgraphics, if you really must, but not PDFs.
PDFs are an awful way to convey content. The only thing that's probably worse is if you store your document as a BMP file. PDFs should never have been intended for long term use. They served a useful purpose as a transitory document format until someone would come up with something real. People came up with real, semantic document (markup) languages a long time ago (HTML, EPUB). PDF should have died at this point, but unfortunally, it stuck around. Even worse, it became so popular that semantically meaningul formats are nowadays converted into PDFs just because people expect PDFs.
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