The main utility would be from ensuring that the names are unique identifiers (at least within the concept of a model) so we could use them for a human-editable file format if we ever come up with one. I don't like having a particular string attribute be handled differently than the others.Can't we just use a regular string attribute for this?
This is not something to act on now, more something to keep in mind as we think about IO formats. For reference, my current favorite choice for a user-editable file format is python, where this is all sort of moot. We could relatively easily write code to dump everything to a .py file (and for doing that ensure that each particle has a unique name attribute).