This isn't a "benefits" issue, it's just a "what's possible" one. With SQL-Server, you have
a choice of SDEBINARY or native GEOMETRY or GEOGRAPHY (the latter only applies to
coordinates stored in decimal degrees).
Altering views after construction is not supported. It's probably done all the time, but
there's little way to prevent something bad from happening (bad things include returning
NJULL or duplicate registered rowid (objectid) values, unsupported column types, and
various other issues that will prevent ArcGIS from accessing the table).
Using native geometry is probably best in this situation, but it has quirks, too (most
notably, accessor functions which are case-sensitive). As long as the resulting views
contain the types supported by ArcGIS, with distinct unique rowids, you can register
the with with ArcGIS.
- V