If you travel at all, you get better returns, usually, from a rewards card than you would from 1% cash back. For me, if a ticket is < 400, I'll just pay for it, so my most recent use of miles was for a $600+ ticket. At 25,000 miles, that's better than 1% return and the ticket has more flexibility. Similar for hotel points. If you use reward points judiciously, you can do much better than 1% and sometimes better than 2%. I'm pretty sure there's a discussion of this in the credit card forums.