[Outlaw Hans]

It's mostly the musicians and the way of working. It's very easy to just record 20 traks of guitar and copy paste it into a decent part. However, nothing beats having to think of what a song truly needs and go from there, not seldom having to send players home with a copy of the basics to rehearse until they can get it done in one take. The same goes for miking an instrument. When there's only 24 tracks you have to make discisions early on. The thing with overdubbing and too many mics and options is that when you don't know what your drums will sound like you can't make a good descision on guitar sounds and so on. Musicians, engineers and producers have to commit just a little more. Naturally this pays off.
I track to tape and find it no drawback whatsoever because it is in line with my way of working.
Having said that, I don't fully agree with the sentiment that the sound of tape hasn't got anything to do with it. When I have all my mics setup around the drumkit and listen to the live take through the console I love the sound, but there may be still some frequencies flying around the room so to speak. A snare may still have that nasal knack in the mids. You can still hear that there are microphones involved. Tape does solve this problem brilliantly. It's the finishing touch when you've got everything else in order. The seperation between instruments is clearer. And it's not to do with pushing the tape to its limits which is highly overrated.
I'm not saying that there aren't other ways but tape does a thing to sound which can clearly be heard on the old recordings.
Take Excile on mainstreet. That is a very difficult production in that it's not too tight and there's a lot going on. I can imagine that record being a lot harder to mix if done in PT.