The segment registers were less prominent on the 80386 in protected mode since you also have paging, and each segment can be 4G in size. On the 80286 in protected mode the segment registers are still very much there (no paging, each segment is still limited to 64k).
Segments are awesome if they're much larger than available RAM - handling pointers as "base + offset" is often much easier to understand than just raw pointers.
