Inches are nicer than centimeters in the sense that inches and feet encourage thinking with fractions moreso than the metric system. For example, if a bookshelf is to be 1 meter long, and a carpenter needed to mark 1/3 of its length, she would have to measure 33.33.... cm. On the other hand, measuring 1/3 of a foot is simply 4 inches. Feet and inches have base 12 built into them, and this is very nice. Also, fractions of an inch are much more common than fractions of a centimeter. 1/4, 1/8/ 1/16, 1/32 etc of an inch are delineated clearly on most American measuring devices. This eases the design process greatly. Dealing with sixteenths of an inch or other powers of 2 is arithmetically convenient. Metricfags don't even know what to do with sixteenths.
