Hi keagles,
It can be still useful to do manual failover in some cases. For example, you would like to do some HW/OS maintenance on the active datanode - you can fail over manually to the other NN without distrupting running processes on the cluster.
Also, you can do configuration changes to the NN in the same way. Change config, then restart the Standby NN, it will start with the new configuration, fail over, then restart the other one. See, you updated your NN's settings without the need to do a full cluster stop.
These are not possible with a non-HA configuration.
cheers,
zegab