A questions often asked is why go with InfoPath Forms when you could get SharePoint Lists to often produce a dynamic form based on your views and columns in an edit mode and have users input data to lists via a SharePoint List View.
Well, heres of some my ideas:
a) SharePoint lists are great for allowing users and your custom SharePoint applications to maintain and consume data as list items for these lists.
b) They can easily be setup by power business users or a site administrator.
c) While lists are a great place to store information, what about accessing other disparate system data that may in no way be housed in SharePoint? It often comes down to a number of design principals, but I suggest that list web pages be used when the level of calculations are straight forward
d) Repeating table found in InfoPath aint a feature in lists – enough of a compelling reason to use InfoPath!!
e) Multiple Views and Data Connections for a single form.
f) Additional workflows to sections of the form, a list item is one entity, data can be stored in one list.
g) Custom code behind using Visual Studio Tools for Applications.
h) Your license type. InfoPath Server is available as a MOSS enterprise product. That means MOSS Enterprise and not Standard or WSS.
i) If you need to read/write information to present across multiple libraries or lists from a central form.
j) Simple and quicker to create and deploy as opposed to creating say a custom web part with business logic before submitting to lists.
k) Perform business logic functions on the form while your user completes the form.
l) Easily hook up fields to web services.
So you can imagine how my face dropped when I heard the client had these above requirements and no InfoPath Server and no spend for enterprise license. Guessing some hard core time-consuming, labour intensive web part development ;-)