Salting just defends against precomputed hashes (rainbow tables). Using a slower algorithm such as bcrypt defends against brute force attacks.

Case in point: I cranked through LinkIn's 6+ million SHA hashes using a dictionary of around ~20 million words (not counting JtR's manipulation rules). The total runtime was maybe half an hour. Using bcrypt makes brute force attacks much less practical. It's also good practice to iterate your hashing algorithm, each time feeding the resultant hash as input. Running sha256sum tens of thousands of times is a lot slower than running it once.