In general, cameras are moving more towards putting Photoshop-like features into the camera, which makes a lot of sense. But the problem is that all of these effects remove data from your photos, which might ruin them.
When you take a photo, your camera sensor records whatever light hits it. That is the "RAW" image. Then your camera processes the image and compresses it into JPEG. The "Highlight Tone Priority" feature is a Photoshop-like filter which creates contrast in the brightest areas of your photos, where you might otherwise have virtually solid white.
There are several of these "post processing" features that the camera performs: Picture Style, Highlight Tone Priority, Sharpening, Auto Lighting Optimizer, Lens Correction, White Balance, and JPEG compression. These steps, especially the compression, remove about 80% of your image. If you take a RAW image, these settings are stored with the image, but none of these settings affect the RAW image itself one bit.
For example, I shot some pictures of a band in black and white. I used the Picture Style feature to create black and white. When I open up the RAW images in Canon's DPP application, the photos show up in black and white. If I turn on Highlight Tone Priority, that effect is applied. BUT, those effects are applied by the DPP software AFTER I open the file. Those settings don't change the RAW file one bit. The RAW file has instructions included with it that tell the computer software what to do after opening the file, but the instructions can be changed. The RAW data never changes. I can still view my photos as black and white or color, and I can remove the Highlight Tone Priority effect.
So the moral of the story is: If you shoot in RAW, you will never need to worry if your white balance or Highlight Tone settings will ruin your images, because you can always change them later without affecting the image. The goal is to shoot pictures that can be used without post-processing (because it saves us time), but if we get that awesome picture, we want to be able to fix the brightness/contrast/et cetera. And that's what RAW will let you do. All of the image data that Highlight Tone Priority and the other features work with is stored in the RAW file without changing the RAW image that the sensor captured.
I hope that answers your question.