It certainly is required if I want to have quick, easy access to my media player controls through Indicator-sound. Removing PulseAudio from Ubuntu/Linux Mint removes that, and it takes some adding of a specialized PPA (the old alsa tools aren't present in Ubuntu anymore) and installing 3rd-party packages in order to get basic controls that don't have the nice easy-access controls for all my media players all in one menu. I don't want to do that just so I can run a couple Windows programs. This "update" just makes thing so much more difficult than they really need to be.
