hmm well yeah but that's cheating :P
the thing i don't like about direct downloads is they fail often, they are more difficult and manual and the speed varies a lot. also, for large splitted files you will need to start each download manually etc while with torrents its usually the other way around: a lot of files (eg a whole season of a show) are put into one single torrent. and often you don't have to unrar/zip a torrent because the entire file/directory structure can be downloaded using torrents which is not possible with direct downloads without archiving of some sort.

torrent speed depends on the popularity of the file though, but its usually not a problem... also torrent downloads arent limited by membership stuff so they are more free than direct downloads