Pages can be bookmarked easily, which can be incredibly important. Pages can be bookmarked easily only sometimes! Everybody seems to have adopted the same database-centric but user-hostile (and cache/crawler-hostile) approach to pagination of posts (see: any blog platform, engadget, tumblr, etc).
Their brain damaged flow goes: You make a new post. The new post appears at the top of the front page. But, the front page has a limited number of story slots. So, the oldest story on the front page gets pushed to page two. But page two has limited slots, so the oldest story on page two goes to page three. Repeat for every page. Some sites have tens to hundreds of thousands of "pages." (Preemptive note to future comment haters: I know the site doesn't "push" articles to every page because it's all just database queries, but the effect is the same.)
Every time you make a new post, you invalidate all thousand (ten thousand? 100k? million?) older pages. It's absolutely moronic. Google has no chance of keeping up. You make one new post and Google has to re-index thousands of pages.
The proper solution is to make pages "fill up" then have your root page point to the highest numbered page. Example: http://omgpagination.tumblr.com/ would logically be page 600, then the "Older Posts" button would link to page 599. Instead, everybody right now makes / always be page 1, "Older Posts" always links to page 2, etc. But those URLs aren't content stable and every update invalidates your cache of the entire site. Your oldest posts on your site should always be on page 1, not a moving target of page {TOTAL_POSTS / POSTS_PER_PAGE}.
In short: be a little more clever and do the right thing for your caches. What's good for your caches is inevitably good for your users too.