To /boot or not to /boot

A couple of Linux distros suggest making a separate partition for the /boot folder. Well, they must have a reason for it but I never understood why. For an usual desktop it might make no sense to spend a partition just for something that is at most 100MB and the obvious step is to leave /boot a regular folder on the root partition. I've considered having /boot a separate partition an overkill until I discovered a couple of reasons that look fine to me.

First reason is that GRUB (I imply that the obvious choice for a boot loader is GRUB) can still load it's stage2 files if somehow the root partition is damaged. You may boot with no worry other operating systems, ie if you have another Linux installed or even Windows from another disk (using the map tricks).

Another reason may be more suitable for development machines where the software configuration changes depending on the project requirements. Having /boot a separate partition can save some time when removing the Linux root partition. And, one of the incomprehensible solutions, to use GRUB for managing several windows operating systems on the same machine. Sounds weird but there is nothing wrong with it, GRUB implements multiboot specification and it can handle more than it's used for.