I rooted my device within a couple days of getting it. This is my first android device, but I am an uber Linux nerd, so not having superuser access to the filesystem was driving me nuts!

The part of your system you can modify is mounted read/write. But a majority of the system is mounted read only. Thus in order to get at most of it and actually be able to modify things, you need superuser (root) access to remount r/w and save it. That said this can be super dangerous if you don't know what the heck you're doing, but to me not having that control was infuriating.

One of the functions the common user can get from rooting (besides real backups as mentioned above) is access to the hosts file. This file is the last word in your systems resolution of IP addresses. So you can modify it so that ad addresses are no longer resolved by Google DNS, but rather /etc/hosts to (usually) 127.0.0.1, which is your localhost or your machine/device. Ergo, bye bye ads. This is how adfree and adaway work.

I am definitely the type of user to try things like new ROMs as well. Know that if you go through the process of unlocking your bootloader and flashing a custom recovery, rooting may not be necessary if you plan on installing an alternate ROM. This is because you would be flashing a whole new /system onto you N7 which typically includes the root binary.

There are a whole bunch of other advantages that root access can give you. I also frequently use a samba server or sftp server to make my device's filesystem accessable via my computer. Thus making the transfer of files to and from my computer super easy (though I have those things set up on my Linux machines anyway, but it makes it convenient from other peoples computers or devices).

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