It's not any better, in terms of weight or rank, however using subdomains gets you the LINKS on google.

If you go to google and type "handsonwebhosting", you'll see our website, and then a bunch of links to our support, knowledgebase, forums, VPS, etc. There was talk in the past that having the subdomains allowed google to separate things and show the pages easier, however you'll notice that we also have regular pages/folders within our main site ranked with no problem.

For us, the benefit of having subdomains is that we actually have the content/software located on different servers, and sometimes different Class C locations. This will give you bosts in search engines as you're runing on different locations.