[brudgers]

Pantone brings consistency. If you specify a Pantone color, pay a printer to use the right Pantone inks on the right media (and pay for the level of experience for the printer to do this right), you can get exactly what you expect.

By which I mean your company logo will by the right color (assuming your logo was specified as a Pantone color).

When printed, of course.

The hubub is because the Pantone color pallets have been a convenient way of picking colors for many use cases where consistency doesn't matter enough to pay for Pantone inks and the class of printer who can do them right...which is almost all use cases, everywhere all the time.

Pantone created the onscreen colors to facilitate soft proofing. In the small segment of users using them for that, the cost of a license is trivial because clients who require Pantone colors already expect to pay the costs associated with using them.