
It can save your ass when X takes a dump (not too often, but it does happen). And it can run in a terminal when X is working.
I spent considerable time looking for a "pretty" replacement for mc, and eventually gave up. Nothing managed to do everything that mc does as quickly, as easily and conveniently. There are some nice file managers out there, but every one I tried wound up lacking something that I really like about mc.
Opera is my browser of choice, because what memory and disk space it does use pays off in performance. For documents that don't need the OO capabilities, AbiWord is great.
I also regularly use Xfig and pcb (although pcb understandably requires at least a little horsepower to run). XV is surprisingly capable for a viewer, even though it looks a tad ugly by today's standards.
Before AfterStep got all clunky and slow (at least around the time they made the transition to 2.0), I used it. Now I use Fluxbox. I still use fetchmail and pine. When alpine comes a little further along, I'll probably give it a try.
The one solid disappointment for me has been Tux racer. I have never really been able to successfully play that game with any kind of responsiveness on anything but a powerful machine. I remember it being included in the Red Hat 5.2 distribution and there was no way it would play on my 120 MHz 486 with 32 MB of RAM. Ah, the good old days...
If it's worth doing, it's worth doing for money.