Comment 107 for bug 371897

1) Distribution are currently moving over to PulseAudio as default. Fedora 8 already uses it as default sound system, Ubuntu and OpenSuSE plan to do so. When PulseAudio is being used, you can not use ALSA or OSS directly. There are compatibility layers for OSS and ALSA being provided by PulseAudio, but they both increase the latency. The ALSA layer does not work in connection with Wine.

2) When everything works well, nearly all applications using sound will use PulseAudio as sound output. Many already have PulseAudio output plugins, namely Gstreamer, Xine and Mumble. Because of them all using PA, Wine would not have to maintain great amounts of backends.

3) Proper software mixing. Because of 2, software mixing should work fine using almost all software then.

4) Better support for Thin Clients as Pulse Audio has great Networking Support. Many LTSP implentations already using PA.

5) Moving sounds on-the-fly between devices.

This statements are without warranty, but should be true.

Also have a look at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/LennartPoettering