I wrote:

>> Unless the admin transfers the installation to another system. Assuming
>> that everything used to work fine with eth0 - eth3, all hell will
>> break lose because the sole four interfaces are now called eth4 - eth7.
>
> But the point is, the admin can then, with one simple edit, return those to being eth0-3.

Just to add, coming back to a use-case you mentioned earlier.
If you are building an appliance, where you will be deploying to multiple hardware by imaging the disk and having it self-configure out of the box, then there are other options. In this situation, you'll have known hardware (or at least, a limited set of known configurations) - such as using physical bus location.
That's doable through udev rules without needing to have stupid and unwieldy device names.