Lonny Niederstadt shares an interesting scenario:
Consider a snapshot database which is created daily. The purpose is to provide analytics reporting access while maintenance or data loads take place in the source database. In the snapshot database, analytics reports have no locking concerns from the activity in the underlying source database. And the temporary statistics provided by SQL Server, combined with the statistics inherited from the source database, provide a lot of information to the optimizer for query plan selection.
But what if significant fact tables are queried in the snapshot and leave a situation like col2 in stats_test? A column which generates an auto-created stat in the snapshot, but never gets a statistic created in the source database. Each day, the cost of creating that statistic and every statistic like it will be paid as part of the workload. Even if the underlying table is a now-stable dimension.
Click through for the demonstration.