I use an H8000 for effects once I'm in the digital domain. It works great. I find I generally prefer the sound of a real tube amp over the H8000 distortion effects. However, I can do things with the H8000 that I can't do anywhere else. For example, I built a patch to do frequency-dependent distortion (i.e., the low notes are distorted differently from the high notes).
That said, for everything but distortion, the H8000 rules.