Jonathan Kehayias has some good use cases for transactional replication:
Why in the world would you want to use Transactional Replication? Isn’t that the thing that is impossible to manage, difficult to configure, and always prone to problems? As a consultant, I see a lot of scenarios where every problem becomes a nail because all you have is a hammer. Sometimes another technology can provide a solution to problems that exist but little is known about the technology, and Transactional Replication tends to fall into this scenario in my experience. In this post we are going to take a look some of the more common Transactional Replication use cases as well as some scenarios where it can be used to solve a business problem in a different way. As with anything, Transactional Replication is just another tool to have in your toolbox.
To be fair, merge replication is much more impossible to manage, difficult to configure, and prone to problems…