1) It's still an IDE. Because of pricing I mostly use Codex, but I always have a VSCode/Cursor IDE open, thus have to juggle between the two. Working directly in the IDE is more comfortable. For full on vibecoding that might be worse, but when you want to do a deep review of the changes, an IDE is way better than reading a diff on github.
2) It supports every model. It's often very helpful to try different models when you don't like the result of the first.
They seem to be doing their darndest to kill advantage #1. Even the command line "cursor ~/git" no longer opens an IDE in the ~/git folder but some random Chatgpt-esque interface that nobody asked for. Honestly, VS Code is a better "old Cursor" now than Cursor is.
#2 hasn't been much of an issue for me since Opus 4.5 came out. Anything the other models could do, Claude could do better. Of course things are starting to change now, and I've noticed Sol Ultra is specifically better at visual design stuff than Claude, but even that ~3% of cases I switch to GPT are still more easily solved with a cheap Codex sub than Cursor.
Also, Cursor really pushes you to use their agent stuff, I had to close/switch just to get to the goddamn code whenever I opened something in Cursor. VSCode is still happy to be an editor where code is centered for my review.
These days I've switched to Zed, which is good enough (and wicked fast), but I still miss Cursor as an IDE.