The biggest difference between the two camps is, without a doubt, the ease of installation.
Some people never use the sync features, but that's nuts.
You are definitely risking losing all your PDA data if you don't back those babies up. It worked in each and every case like it should. Much to my surprise, I even got KPilot for KDE to work, though it was far too buggy for normal use. The Cassiopeia was another story. The Windows 98 install was straightforward thanks to plug and pray, but the NT install was a miss-mash of insanity combined with the hardware blindess that NT currently packs.