Richie Lee encountered a use case for trickle migration:
Recently I needed to apply compression data on a particularly large table. One of the main reasons for applying compression was because the database was extremely low on space, in both the data and the log files. To make matters worse, the data and log files were nowhere near big enough to accommodate compressing the entire table in one go. If the able was partitioned then I could have done one partition at a time and all my problems would go away. No such luck.
Best way to eat an elephant, etc. etc. Read the whole thing; you might be in a similar situation someday.