Print film has a greater exposure latitude than slide film. You could be off a stop or two with print film, and the prints would hardly show it, but you'd notice a 1/2 stop difference with slide film.
Print film is lower contrast than slide film. Depending on lighting conditions this can be good or bad. My photog buddy who also shoots LF tranparency film has problem shooting in the middle of the day when the contrast is high. On the other hand his early morning shots are nice and punchy.
Where I live it's $7 to get a roll of E6 (slides) developed at a pro lab, and about $12 to get a roll of C41 (negs) developed and printed. It used to be very expensive to get prints from slides, but most labs (around here at least) have gone to digital printing and offer them at the same price as prints from negs (so a roll of E6 developed and printed would be about $15).
One of the main reasons that people say pros use slides is because with a slide you have a color accurate original (this is actually BS, but generally accepted to be true, so I won't argue it here) for a publisher or printer to work from. They can look at the slide and see how the print is supposed to look. With neg film you are bringing a printer (unless you are printing your own) into the mix, and they may have different ideas about how the color in your image should look. They can't really look at the neg and see how it's supposed to be; they have to use their own judgement.
Also, I think that slide quality goes down significantly at ISO 400 and faster when compared to high speed color neg films. Depending on what you are shooting this may be a consideration.
While there are mags and other commercial buyers that are still only accepting slides and transparencies (mostly landscape and nature mags), these days many will accept digital files. Since my website has been up I've been selling usage rights to low res files of my images to advertisers for a lot more than I've been able to sell actual hand done prints for (I do BW, which is almost all neg film). I think that the days of slide only for publishing are on the way out.
Talk to your local lab, and see what is most economical to get what you need. Then experiment with both pos and neg films, and see what you like, and what works best for you. There is no rule saying you can't shoot both. If my clients want slides, I shoot slides. If they want prints, I shoot neg film. If they want files, I choose the film based on what would be best for the job. Velvia (E6) looks fantastic in the right light, and crappy in other light. Kodak Gold 200 (C41) looks good in a wide variety of situations. BW pretty much only comes in neg film, although there are a few positive versions, or processes which can be used to turn BW neg film into pos film. Although with the incredible exposure latitude of BW neg film, I can't imagine many situations in which BW pos film would be better. But that's just my opinion...
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