Conduit in kitchens, pro's and cons

There are two primary reasons to use conduit: Fire protection/prevention and future wiring. If neither are concerns for you, don't bother.

Here in Minnesota, conduit in single-family homes is all but unheard of. I can see it becoming code eventually if evidence accumulates that it's worth the loss of life and property it may prevent.

Conduit provides expandability

One of the banes of amateur chefs that we have seen over and over again on this site is having too much kitchen equipment and not enough juice available to make good use of it. The Code-minimum of two 20A small appliance circuits is good for well, about two kitchen appliances, give or take one depending on how they are mapped to receptacles, and there are plenty of situations where you might want to run say, the microwave, the coffeepot, and the toaster oven at the same time without tripping a breaker.

With NM, you're stuck opening walls, fishing cable, and patching drywall if you want any more power to that kitchen. However, with conduit work, any electrician can get in there and fish additional wires through the conduit, up to its fill limits (both physical and thermal/ampacity). As a result, conduit is ideal for running wiring to places like kitchen islands, where things like floor slabs can make installing additional cables a nightmare.

You can put away the pipe bender though

However, you can get that benefit without having to spend major money and time on hand-bending EMT until it's just so. One of the not-so-dirty little tricks that not many outside the trade are familiar with is that ENT (blue or grey corrugated PVC "smurf tube", albeit not the similar-looking orange stuff known as communications raceway) is legal to use as a mains wiring method in any application where NM is acceptable. It's also cheap and rather easy to find on home-store shelves; furthermore, the conduit itself can be bent by hand and fished in long lengths, and suitable plastic boxes are readily available for new work applications.

Keep in mind that you'll need to make sure there's a box or conduit body for every 360° of bend to provide an access point for pulling, just like with EMT, and that you'll also need to provision a grounding wire in your ENT, since it's made of plastic, not metal. You'll still need the nail-plates to protect it, just like NM, but given what you gain (conduit expandability at a NM-cable pricetag), that's a rather acceptable tradeoff to make in my book.