I think it's fine for simple scenarios (i.e. plain GET), but it breaks down in a hurry and the fact that you have to read out of the response stream is real overhead.
So's python's urllib2, the point of `request` is that as soon as you go even slightly beyond very basic GET and POST, it breaks down quickly in a horrible mess.
I'm still surprised every time I use it that they've not released a modern library for it in .Net.