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This is actually a left over from the very first few years that IEEE1394, otherwise known as Firewire and USB. It has been a long standing fact that disconnecting anything with a charge while it's running, can and does run the risk of corrupting the data source. Hell, In the 15 + years that I've been working on computers I've seen a couple times where unplugging and plugging in a PS/2 Keyboard broke the keyboard! If I hadn't seen it happen, I wouldn't have believed it myself.
The truth is even a device that claims to be able to plug and unplug has some minor albeit possible risk of corruption.
Apple has for years required you to physically "drag" the USB or Firewire device to the Trash before disconnecting, if you don't, Mac's will nag you about it. They know that it is possible to corrupt the drive.
A key issue too is if there is data that is being written to the drive; or, if there is data written to the device that is a temporary file. Changes in drive formatting, such as NTFS and the like have greatly improved the protection that random temp files left over on a drive can do to a system if they're rogue...
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