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In the old days before Unicode the named entities served a good purpose. They would allow entering characters not in the codepage you had and they would usually still be rendered. Now, since ePUB must be unicode anyway, there is no strict need. You can use them, but it can seriously mess up your search/replace activities.
Like Turtle said, only a few are required like the named entities for &, < and >. I personally find the also useful.
In ePUB3 names entities are no longer used by default. You can still use the Unicode entities or the direct Unicode characters though.
In general you are more than fine in not using them permanently. If I need an dash, I type in the named entity because it is easier to type. Sigil converts it to the Unicode character for me.
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