Jeff,
I won't speak for everyone, and certainly not for Nikhil. But I just wanted to contribute my thoughts about this.
I often like to "View SQL" if it is not greyed out when the search results will be large. Perhaps I'm doing some type of large information dump for administrative purposes. Data migrations or synchronizations/comparisons with ERP system.
The reason for this is to bypass the querylimits that are set through the UI. This is the problem I've encountered with 9.1. I'm not sure if it is any different in 10x, as far as being able to bypass querylimits for admins.