I'd say the advantage of seperating / and /home is that it makes a re-install more painless. You can keep your personal data and config without copying it to another drive and just reformat / alone.
And swap is required if you want to use suspend to disk which is the reasoning the article has.
I have managed to switch from a different distro to Arch without losing my /home by deleting everything other than /home. I imagine it would be tougher if the distro I switched to wasn't Arch.
Some time ago I messed around and somehow managed to break my Ubuntu system so that it wouldn't boot. Instead of bothering to work out how to fix it I just re-installed (with a different version number) and kept my old /home partition. It all worked out of the box.
Yeah, what I meant was that I had my /home on / rather than on a separate partition, and managed to install a completely different linux distro anyway without losing it.
And swap is required if you want to use suspend to disk which is the reasoning the article has.