Comment 48 for bug 212789

I agree that it should just work without ever needing to know how, but because of examples like those already given by myself and ma2414ma, not all applications are using gvfs (and some, like VLC don't play nice with it) yet, and it could be quite some time (or never) before they do. Providing a visible location for the mount points provides a workaround for the problems that currently exists. But even if those problems all got addressed, you'd still need the mount points in order to use the terminal with connected shares. Though it has already been mentioned that Linux is not OS X (and I too am glad it's not), Apple is all about the user experience and obviously they felt that having a /Volumes folder was sensible.