I knew of the practical advantages of RAW over JPEG even before I searched the site and found what seems to be the canonical question. Yes, the processed images look better.
But when I tried to explain to a non-photographer why it is better, I dived into murky theoretical waters I'm not too familiar with. The ones I could explain properly were the role of bit depth and compression artefacts; the one I skipped but know is important was the role of matrices and proper demosaic. And, of course, existing camera firmware and processing software supports RAW, not 12-bit bitmaps.
So, are there any other reasons why one can get more out of a RAW image than out of a JPEG? Or would there have been no reason for postprocessing RAW if we were working with 12-bit bitmaps with losless compression?