If you wanted to, you could memorize a 24 word mnemonic for a paper wallet to and recover into electrum or other bip39 wallets.
Like said above, the only benefit from a hardware wallet is that you can transact from an insecure computer if you needed too. If you wanted to transact with a paper wallet and loaded your seed into an infected computer, then you're fucked. Also, I guess the hardware wallet more easily handles forks like BCC.