It's good because it adds a lot of interesting buffer space between your valuable systems. Nebulas and black holes have strategic value for attack and defence, and the distances involved force you to think about supply lines and things like that when you send your fleets out. Since systems with useable planets are rarer, they become a lot more valuable; this changes the strategy too (you can't have "throwaway" colonies out on the border to slow down an enemy advance, for example). Remote mining can become actually significant to your economy, and then you have to defend all those remote mining satellites strewn about in the asteroid systems too.
With standard mid-life maps, for example, you can almost always avoid the black hole systems. But what if you _had_ to transit one in order to reach enemy territory?
Of course, this isn't necessarily a "better" way to play, just different.
