Well I still say Davis needs to give us two options of how to connect the station to the computer. I also leave my computer running 24/7. Therefore the datalogger is useless to me. All I need to do is connect the station and let my weather software do the rest.
Guess that depends upon how you define useless. If you're power goes out or even more likely your PC crashes or locks up, you're going to lose data. The datalogger prevents that.
Not that I don't agree that you should be able to connect to the PC without a datalogger, but you need to understand that a good part of Davis' target audience involves agriculture and applications that are not always accessible. Unlike what most of us here do, those stations are not going to be hooked up to a PC all the time.
So in short, what most of us are doing represents only a piece of the pie, and I too would like to see an option to hook to the PC directly. But despite the fact that my Wx PC is connected 24/7, I consider the datalogger far from useless, I consider it a necessity and would own one even if there was a direct connect capability.