Las Vegas makes sense

I have always been an anti-las vegas guy, promising to myself never to visit there.
I broke my promise, as my kids started going to soccer tournaments and to my dismay from all places they would choose Las Vegas!.
Now first let me explain why I don't like Las Vegas.
From the 3 things that make Las Vegas special
 - gambling and casinos
 - disneyworld for adults
 - sin-sity
 I don't mind about the more liberal morality implied by the "sin-city" side of Vegas. Having grown in a country that allows regulated prostitution, and in my view having seen the positive and negative effects of legalizing vs criminalizing prostitution I am squarely in favor of legalizing it.
But the other two parts are leaving me personally un-interested and to some extent I even myself negativeling judging people that are interested in them.

But I concluded in my most recent visit that I was totally wrong - and I have really not understood what Las Vegas is and what is its role in the grand future.
In the world of tomorrow, a world where people live from wherever they want joining others in online groups for work, research, special interests, activities etc, in that world there is still the need of the occasional physical grouping. And in many cases the grouping is pretty large. Be it a gathering of fans of a certain movie, a gathering of people working together in the same company, gathering of researchers in some obscure field - gatherings, conventions, conferences is going to be the primary model of direct physical interaction for any group. And thats what Las Vegas is. A whole place that has made itself perfect as the "convention" center in the world.

Conventions have a problem: Just like the first large-scale video-conferencing attempts find out, you cannot rely on the bandwidth and available resources of a normal data center if you are to bring at a moments notice, a thousant people online to listen to something. You need a much larger infrastructure that specializes in this kind of spiky behavior. A normal tourist city like San Francisco get totally overwhelmed with oracle-world. Las Vegas has developed an infrastructure in almost every possible way to allow massive gatherings.
My kids played in a lighted soccer field complex that had 10 full soccer fields side by side all with massive lights and places for people to sit. On the way to that field, I passed several other ones like it. The variety of the convention types means a significant variety of types of entertainment:
 - Lots of fields sales of a company convention => lots of gambling
 - Comdex and computer like attendees, lots of high tech shows
and Shopping and Artsy shows and and.. In general anything to allow any convention to find its perfect setting in the area.