Well, aside from being a different data structure with different characteristics that will be more or less suitable for a given computation, they share the same primary trait with vanilla tuples: they are immutable.

They also let you improve readability (as the article states), while being full compatible with the ordinary tuple api. In other words, I can make a named tuple where I think it will improve my own code, and then pass it into someone else's code that is expecting a tuple and it will work. If you had used a dict or somesuch in this scenario, you would have to do something to marshall the state back into a tuple before you could pass the data into some library that expects tuples, e.g. numpy or something.