Aside form neatness factor and hacker street cred, I don't exactly get the practical point for the vast majority of software. What am I to do with such a binary

Aside form neatness factor and hacker street cred, I don't exactly get the practical point for the vast majority of software. What am I to do with such a binary? Do I put it live on my website and allow my clients to download it? If I leave it with an .exe extension so that it runs in the Windows shell, wouldn't that confuse users of other platforms? What if I need a directory structure as 99% of programs do? Do I use a zip or a tgz? In the first case, how do I preserve permissions on Unix targets? Do I need to instruct my clients into how to use tgz on the command line and/or create permissions? Software distribution is by its nature a very platform specific problem; even if we accept the premise of an x64 world, an universal binary solves just a very small portion of the practical problems of portable deployment. Ironically, the best use case I can imagine is creating an universal binary installer that can run on any Unix system and then proceed to make platform-specific decisions and extract files contained in itself, sort of like Windows binary installers work. But that's an utterly broken distribution model compared to modern package managers.