Long ago, I fell in love with panoramas...
I tend to do my panoramas hand-held, then stitch the frames together using autostitch. I sometimes crop the photos to a rectilinear shape, but tend to prefer the unevenness that hand-holding the camera creates, since slight movements up or down easily shows up in the final stitched image.
I also like to shoot unusual panoramas. In other words, scenes that one would not typically consider as "panoramic" in nature. It's the process of creating something in multiple shots that I might not otherwise have been able to shoot with one frame that intrigues and challenges me.