You can embed the name returned by find into the middle of lengthy commands by using the -exec option - it can be harder to do that with a pipe. It's also more resilient (in some cases) to filenames that have spaces in them.

Because it's a good/easy way to insert the file name into the _middle_ of the statement. For example:

  find . -name "*.gif" -exec convert "{}" "{}.png" \;

Will convert every GIF in the current directory (and its descendants) into a PNG, assuming imagemagick's convert is on your path. Is there a better way? Not that I know of.