In my opinion Scratchpad has some limitations:

• space is limited and nothing will warn you when you reach the limit of 64Kb;
• nodes are added using href links, wasting even more space but probably saving some load to the server;
• it isn't devoted only to bookmarks;
• it doesn't detect duplicates (Personal Nodelet has the same problem of course);
• it cannot be accessed by programs if it is marked as 'not public', even if you provide your login and want to access your scratchpad.

Using your brower bookmarks isn't a good solution, because it may be difficult to obtain a 'bookmarkable' address after you voted on a note.
So, I think coreolyn has some reason on his side, but I would ask for something different: a third link to something external and user defined that would receive the id of the node currently showed. This solution would provide a hook to implement your really personal way to set bookmarks.

update: fixed an error

update2: Coruscate is right, it is possible to access your own scratchpad parsing user info, but the canonical solution remains broken.
In the meanwhile, larsen informed me that there is a patch from belg4mit that would solve the href problem.

update3: clarification for tye: the canonical solution is to use displaytype=xml on a user node. In normal conditions, with scratchpad public, I see the content in the data section; otherwise it is not shown. Using displaytype=raw with node 108949 is not a good solution, because the page would be rendered, altering the original content.