Oracle Database Discussions

I'm looking for some good articles and/or opinions on the arguments of using ASM instead of (or, rather, on top of) a standard NAS solution. What benefits does ASM provide in addition to NAS? What are the drawbacks? I'm specifically looking for information on a single-instance implementation (I know the additional benefits when dealing with RAC).

From my experience, ASM makes the DBA job a bit easier and may provide better striping for a database (vs standard files), but it has drawbacks like administrating yet another instance, not being able to maintain ASM files with standard command line tools (like cp, dd, etc), and having another layer of confusion when something goes wrong.

Thanks.