A major advantage of servos is they give far better acceleration compared with a stepper.
I looked at the leadshine closed loop system, and it's a very cost effective way to get good reliable positioing, but I've personally put that on hold for other reasons.

And in the encoder count debate, the DMM-tech servos use a 14bit absolute position encoder, and the drive converts it to incremental if you need encoder feedback. However that is the only motor/drive combo I came across in the lower power servos that I looked at, that used an absolute encoder.
I spent a good bit time a couple weeks ago weighing up the options, and am just waiting to sell a few more bits to buy the first of the servos (not from DMM, as similar power servos/drives can be had over here for similar money)