According to Metalink Note: 578455.1 “Announcement of De-Support of using RAW devices in Release 12G” Oracle will no longer support RAW devices for datafiles, OCR and voting disks. I believe this is a good news considering cumbersome management associated with raw devices – thought not necessarily in all cases and situations.
I’m sure ASM is going to become a mature product by then; perhaps it’s because I’m getting old, but when it comes to changing such critical component as storage management layer I tend to react with caution and conservatism. So far, I survived with cooked file system, avoiding RAW devices, but I’m sure in the long run ASM will be a storage manager of choice, even for non-RAC Oracle customers.