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re: "cave man" It's actually the opposite. Saves the vendor the cost of including a power switch. If you think about it, not much expected routine use for turning power on and off, either the network device is being used or not. "Cave man" was always providing a power switch even if there was little need.
In theory a power switch should break the power cleanly while pulling a plug might cause power to go off/on/off (etc.) as you remove the plug but this matters little. As others have noted, doesn't cause any harm.
PS:
As Reza noted, operating systems often have a graceful shutdown. This because they often have pending file system writes and an abrupt power shutdown would often leave their file systems "corrupted".
Incidentally, today may computer systems will power themselves off at the end of a "shutdown" command, but in times past you had to power them off manually even after telling them to shutdown.
On most later generation PCs, the power button isn't really a power switch. It indicates to the system whether you want it to power itself off/on. Depending on how its designed, I've seen PCs with such power buttons get so "confused" that I still needed to pull the plug to power the system off; often to reboot it.
Oh, and if you think saving costs don't matter to vendors, its also why most PCs never included a hardware reset switch, although hardware by design generally supports it. Much less expensive than an actual power switch, but vendors look at cost vs. what they think you need (or want). This was generally true for hardware reset switches unless you're doing low level driver development.
