you are all pretty much right on, the point is you put a real good tasting flavor on the first impression, so these young teenagers can open it up and get a quick fix, then you draw them in.  It is a known marketing tactic. 
 
You coat that first impression with super sweet love and then let them dig.  The 2 minute experience is a little better in Logic.  Something to think about , maybe.  Maybe not.

I understand the appeal.  It is a dual edged sword though.  You get instant gratification on the off chance ,take for an example a vocal effects chain preset, the vocalist has the exact pitch. timbre and amplitude the preset is based on. Often  I had to go back through a bunch of older projects a colleague had mixed  in Logic with all presets and start from scratch. Everything was mud. If presets are to be used, delay type ones are a safer bet than anything that is frequency based. I find the kids that i walk through the individual aspects of each processor in a chain have a better grasp of what the presets are doing than the ones that just click and hope something sounds good.

Cactus Music
I guess nobodys wants to learn the craft anymore, just push a button and be a pro! Lots of money to be made packaging the concept too.
This all makes the creation of good music into a "fun" game  and there's nothing wrong with that concept. Let the apps rain down from heaven that make music making a childs game. That music has always existed in one form or another since the invention of a Home Organ with Magic Chords.  I for one am glad that the developers of Sonar prefer to keep it as it is and let me pick the processing.   
If everyone starts using cookie cutter templates for music then I'm not sure I want to listen to the results anymore than I enjoy listening to automated keyboard tracks or magic chords.  But the bottom line is someone IS creating something and that will always be a good thing.
 

well said, can't add to that :-)
 
i reckon in the early days everybody is a "preset" person (and I'm still when it comes to jotting down ideas quickly in the creative phase) ... yet, when it comes to crafting a certain sound for a band / project I use templates basically only to speed up workflow, but not to re-create pre-packaged sound (even if it originated in one of my other projects) ...

What's funny is that Sonar had these track templates before Logic did. Maybe Sonar 6 or 7? I remember because I started with 6 and showed it to my Logic addict coworker who right off the bat said "seems kinda useless, I'd rather start fresh because every session is different and I don't want to get put myself in the mindset of doing things a certain way just because I did so last time".

I have found that even with the same artist, recording in the same room with the same mic that EQ and compression presets rarely deliver what i end up going wit in the end.

Step into the Wayback Machine...
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?high=&m=164528&mpage=1#164528
 
This is the famous 2004 thread that coined the ongoing in-joke about "20-40%".
 

I would be interested to know what is in those Logic templates.  For example, is it mostly EQ and compression, or are there effects as well?
 
I have a little PreSonus Eureka hardware channel strip I got a long time ago and that I still use sometimes with certain mics; and if you set the dials for EQ and Compression like it shows for starting settings in the manual, it sounds pretty good.  I'm just wondering if the Logic templates are something like that, or something more exotic.

konradh
I would be interested to know what is in those Logic templates.  For example, is it mostly EQ and compression, or are there effects as well?
 
I have a little PreSonus Eureka hardware channel strip I got a long time ago and that I still use sometimes with certain mics; and if you set the dials for EQ and Compression like it shows for starting settings in the manual, it sounds pretty good.  I'm just wondering if the Logic templates are something like that, or something more exotic.

All kinds of stuff.  They range from simple like "male vocal" which is usually something like an eq with a HP, small presence bump and a compressor with a 2.5:1 setting to  "hip-ho" drumkits that load multiple samples on a track into the eXS24.  Unless you look closely, you have no idea what instrument is being loaded.  You just know it is a drum track and it sounds good.

Tell him to go to his room.

Interesting subject.
I use my own templates exclusively that I have tweaked over the years-running 14-16 mics in a small room requires that.
With the same mics and d.i.s. in the same room it would seem pointless to set up per project templates as basically only volumes change.
As for presets,everyone wants instant playback,especially recording live and applying VC64 (master mix) or whatever the X3 equivalent is (Prochannel?) to the main bus can instantly transform a mix as playing back a dry take can sound pretty thin without presets.
Pretty sure there have been some pretty flash templates created and discussed in Techniques before?
cheers
tony