Well, you said it yourself: it's more readable; not to mention more easily maintainable and extensible. If we all sought to create the most terse code possible with no regard to any of the other important factors in creating 'good code', then we all might as well be writing everything in Pyth or APL.
EDIT: I wouldn't say that all assembly is unreadable or anything like that (for instance, I find inline assembly easier and more readable than using compiler intrinsics for stuff like AMD64 SIMD instructions). I'm just saying that having more code around isn't exactly always a bad thing.
EDIT: I wouldn't say that all assembly is unreadable or anything like that (for instance, I find inline assembly easier and more readable than using compiler intrinsics for stuff like AMD64 SIMD instructions). I'm just saying that having more code around isn't exactly always a bad thing.