Very beautiful. Of course now you have to deal with xargs' wacky syntax and options for string interpolation, which is probably why people don't do this.

Compare:

for i in {1..5}; do echo file_$i; done

with

seq 5 | xargs -I % echo file_%

I had to look up the manpage for xarg's -I, while the for loop uses a small number of orthogonal features entirely in my "working set".

This is also why people "uselessly" use cat.