Is Power Pivot Needed?

As of today Power BI desktop is not a replacement to Modern Excel (Power Pivot-Query-View-Map)

PowerBI Desktop has the following Limitations

1- Lack of printing 

2 – pbix cannot be protected, if you share a report anyone can open it and modify it, basically there is no read only mode.

3- Export to Excel is limited to 30000 records ( there are woraround but still)

4- No pivot table, matrix visual is very limited.

5- Very basic charts capabilities, and lack of customizations

Item 4,5 will be fixed this year, I have no doubt about it, as Microsoft is allocating a lot of resources to close the gap with the competitors (tableau and qlik)

Item 1,2,3 ; are not technical limitations but commercial decisions, so we don’t know what will happen ?? Because potentially there is a risk to cannibalise other products (access, Excel)

But for me, Excel has one killer feature that will never be available in Power BI desktop: cube formula

There is a third way, but it is not supported by Microsoft, Use Power BI Desktop as a backend and Excel as a front end, you can see the detailed here

 https://datamonkeysite.com/2017/01/01/how-to-use-excel-as-a-front-end-to-power-bi-desktop/