It depends? If I'm looking for a new desk on IKEA's online catalog then I care more about filtering/searching, but if I'm reading through a conversation on a forum and want to be able to link to certain sections then I want that paginated.
But even for the latter case, surely you're not specifically interested in a specific page called "page 50" but rather you're interested in items satisfying some predicate (like "posts from 2 weeks ago") or locations respective to the entire list (like "halfway through the list"), and it would be much better if the user interface supported those sorts of navigation.