That's true, and I guess I'm lucky to live in a country with a good quality power grid. Our national power grid has a kind of redundancy built in (sort of dual rings of supply) so I only experience 1 power failure per year on average, and that is mainly caused by local ground workers hitting a power line (most of our powergrid is underground in populated areas) or a nearby transformer station blowing out.
I live on the South end of an island over 30 miles long where the only significant source of power is a set of power lines to the North end of the island. So there is a single point of failure on top of being a dead end in the power grid so power reliability is lower here. We should also note that the USA has some of the most severe weather on planet (wind storms, tornadoes, ...) and here on an island the wind is more potent than many other nearby locales. So we lose power often here, but that is to be expected as there is no financial incentive to provide better power as their are too few consumers here to make it financially viable.
Heck, I know people who live off the grid (are not connect to power or telephones*) nearby.
I also remember in Tennessee the power would flash off for a second a lot when the wind blew, but that was in tornado territory so the wind blew hard there rather often.
But the big one for me is when the alternate power routing kicks in and power is lost for less than a second, then the UPS lets me keep going forward.
Even the big data centers filled with tens of thousands of servers use UPS'es to keep systems running just long enough for their multi megawatt generators to kick in. The power down plan is more for home users or absolute failsafe behavior (i.e., automated shutdown**)
enjoy,
Sean
* They have cell phones.
** Automated shutdown does not work with Windows XP if you have unsaved files as the dialogue boxes that come up asking about saves block shutdown. So an automated shutdown will fail to save files so one may as well just let the computer totally lose power as one is not saving the data unless they are on site anyway.