This is an example of where the internet did things wrong. There are a lot of things it does right, but the stinkers stick out, and this is one of them.
Originally, any system that required a user ID asked you what you wanted for a screen name. Simple systems only allowed letters and/or numbers. Advanced ones allowed letters, numbers, dashes (-) and underscores (_). People were OK with this and it worked well. The email address you used to sign up for the account was separate from the username, meaning an email address change did not affect your username.
Then someone got the not-so bright idea of having the email address itself as the username, and this is where things started to go wrong. Very wrong.
1. Confusion
An email address and a username are two completely separate things, yet it’s easy to confuse them as the same thing on certain websites.
Let’s say one day you want to change the primary email address for your account. You do, but the username, which is now your old email address, remains the same. Why? Because most systems don’t allow username changes. Then your friends see that username and just assume that’s your email address when in fact you don’t use it anymore. You’re using the account, but not the email address that is the username for said account.
Confused yet? I wouldn’t be surprised if you were.
Some systems do in fact change your username to reflect an email address change at the time you make it, but there are still plenty of systems that don’t do that.
2. Any privacy concerns are thrown right out the window
On most (if not all) systems I’ve seen that use your email address as not only your username but also your "profile", they make it publicly searchable by default. This means that if someone searches that sites for your email address, you show up. And maybe you didn’t even want to.
It also doesn’t help that the option to turn this off is usually buried in most sites that use public profiles.
3. Nobody ever wanted to use their email address as a username in the first place
The ID-as-email-address thing fixed a problem that never existed. Someone thought, "Hey! Wouldn’t it be great if the user ID was the email address of the user? I think that would be really convenient!"
No, no.. wrong. So wrong.
Now instead of username "bob" it’s "bob@example.isp". A lengthening of the username for basically no reason? Yes.
A public profile created when you never wanted one in the first place? Yes.
Increased risk of getting mountains of spam because of this crapola? Most definitely.
The true reason why the ID-as-email-address was put into motion is because an email address is unique to the individual who uses it. Your email address is used by nobody but you, and in order to use it as an ID, the system would have you validate that you actually own the address. I understand why this is convenient, but only for the website admin. From a user perspective it’s just completely wrong because it’s decidedly inconvenient.
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It gets worse than that, some websites now ask you to login, even just to post a comment, using your Facebook account, exposing all kind of personal information when that is not what you wanted and you are given no choice.
It also forces people to get an account with a social network when it isn’t really needed as you can speak with people over the phone and unlike with Facebook, phone calls are not normally recorded.
You overlook the obvious reason to use the email address as the ID: people are far less likely to forget them. Plus, your novice user doesn’t understand the “screen name” concept, and have a hard time making one up. I’ve started designing a lot of my systems to just have email for these two reasons. Saves quite a few support calls.