Chunky mode isn't just convenient for texture-mapped games, though. It's more convenient in pretty much anything when you're working with high bit-depth. Consider this: in planar mode, while operations like masking are quicker, drawing a blitter object requires (bits per pixel) number of identical blitter operations, one for each plane. Chunky mode doesn't reduce the the amount of data you have to move, but since each pixel is contained wholly in one chunk (one byte, in the typical case,) it can be done in one operation (well, minus the masking,) which drastically cuts down the overhead required for planar operations.
The only reason chunky mode was balky on the VGA was because there wasn't nearly as much hardware-assist as the Amiga had, and what there was was barely even documented until Michael Abrash (god among men) wrote about it - so for quite some time, nobody used it. Had an Amiga chipset been released that applied the same elegant DMA-oriented design philosophy to an 8bpp chunky mode, it would have blown the VGA completely out of the water.
