All my experience with replication was transaction replication. In that, if we modified the publisher outside of normal data access, we had to completely rebuild the publication. It was a royal pain. It's one of the reasons I started using mirroring. A lot less effort there. Of course, you don't get read copies unless you're in 2012 and using Availability Groups, so, before 2012, replication still has a use, but one I try to avoid where possible.