"Film cameras can be very simple and are generally much more rugged than digital cameras."
I'll give you simple, but general ruggedness is a bs argument. You buy what you need; the existence of plastic DSLRs doesn't make the rugged models any less rugged.
"Many are all-mechanical designs that don't require any batteries, others only need a battery for the light meter. That's very useful when you're travelling, especially to remote locations."
Spare batteries and memory cards take up way less space than an equivalent amount of film rolls. Also, I read an article about two guys who skied across the Antarctic a year or two ago, and they were using a DSLR (though their battery set-up was pretty interesting).
"And film offers a huge amount of variability in appearance. [...] You might be able to imitate many of these effects in Photoshop and the like (or maybe not), but it's not the same."
I contest that you can do a lot more in Photoshop than in a darkroom, especially if you don't limit yourself to trying to imitate the quirks of specific film types.