I don't know if I would say heredoc is laziness. One can say that doing anything is laziness, as there are always more cumbersome ways to do anything.
For example, in certain situations you may want to output text, with embedded variables without having to fetch from a file and run a template replace. Heredoc allows you to forgo having to escape quotes, so the text you see is the text you output. Clearly there are some negatives, for example, you can't indent your heredoc, and that can get frustrating in certain situation, especially if your a stickler for unified syntax, which I am.
