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I suspect that a magical object like a staff is in some ways like the taking on of a physical form. None of the Maiar actually need to incarnate, but it enables them to function better in the physical universe.
The same seems to be true of Elves, but in the opposite way - their fea will eventually (in Middle-earth at least) burn away their hroa & they will exist as beings of spirit only. To what extent a wizard's staff can be seen as an 'extension' of his physical form is an interesting question. To lose a staff may be equivalent to losing a limb - it wouldn't finish you off, but it would severely disable you. It may be that Gandalf was powerfull enough without his staff to perform certain magical acts, but clearly it is useful in extreme circumstances. Or maybe its just easier to use a staff & means less energy is expended in the particular act. I'm not sure there's anything a wizard could do with a staff that he couldn't do without it, but at the same time one could ''charge' it with so much power, or become so dependent on doing magic with it, that without it one became virtually helpless.
It reminds me of Julian May's 'Saga of the Exiles', where the aliens have latent psychic abilities which they activate by using artifical devices (torcs). These necklaces give them great powers but in the end actually prevent them developing their abilities naturally. Anything they could do with the torcs they could have learned to do without them, but they chose the short cut of technology.
Perhaps this is another subtle condemnation of the Machine on Tolkien's part - as he stated magic is another manifestation of the Machine, not something qualitatively different.
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