Absolutely. I already wrote in another part of this discussion "Most of the things one wants or needs to do on the net are most easily accomplished with dedicated tools, so places where only netcat will serve are rare." On the other hand, my little trick does just take a few seconds, and is probably easier than getting ethereal (oops, wireshark) set up for someone new to it.

I do think it's still useful to be aware of and play with tools like netcat, even when there are dedicated tools to accomplish most tasks. It's a bit like hacking in assembly... probably not practical in many cases, but you'll learn how stuff works underneath, and that understanding can still be really useful even when working at a higher level of abstraction.