What are the main benefits of having a layer 3 switch vs. a layer 2 switch other than not needing a separate layer 3 device to route packets between vlans?
I think you should first identify differences between LAyer-3 switching and routing. In fact both are the same (at least functioally). But layer-3 switches perform route lookup and switching operations faster because of hardware accelared architecture. And main usage of layer-3 switch is inter-VLAN routing in LAN/Campus environement.
