As with everything, it depends.<p>Buffers I believe were created for doing IO operations, wherein you need to move chunks of things around, wherein the underlying net stack needs to fill, flip, copy etc..<p>If you're building a video compression library with native components, then Buffers are probably going to help.<p>If you're living purely in Javaland memory managed space, then it's entirely another question, but know that in the vast majority of cases it won't matter.
Try to do a flip and see what happens. Or copy your array to a file, or to a native library.
I've never thought of buffers as a replacement for arrays, and I don't think they were ever ment to be.
The take away from the comparison is basically to do what we were doing already: use native arrays unless doing so with buffers simplifies your code.