From today, you can download Drupal core, Drupal modules, themes and translations in zip forrmat too!
Over the 9 years of Drupal history, many users required zip formatted files in addition to tar.gz format. cPanel, DirectAdmin and some other leading hosting control panels support compressing and extracting archives in a number of formats, including tar.gz and zip; But there are some control panels (in old school) that only support zip format.
