Question: In my company, we have had a policy of tagging every release. Someone new joined, and he suggested that instead of formally using a Tag, we could just leave a comment for the release build when it is checked in. I like using a Tag, but, obviously, we can also get to the source code for a build also by looking for the comment. The only advantage I see is that because our product spans multiple technologies, we can group the source code for both in the same directory with a folder for each. **Is there some other advantage of tagging releases that I'm missing?** BTW, we are using SVN.

Answer: 
A tag in subversion is technically the same as a branch. It is only convention that keeps you from modifying a tag after it was created.

Last year I had a situation where we were very happy that we use tags in subversion.  

We had created a release and tagged that release. In parallel to the acceptance tests on the release, normal development continued on the trunk of the repository. 
The problem was that late in the acceptance tests, a critical issue was found that absolutely had to be solved, but the new stuff that was being developed could absolutely not be included in the release, because it was far from being stable enough.  

We resolved that finally by making use of the fact that under the hood a tag is the same as a branch, so we made the change directly on the tag. If we had used check-in comments to 'tag' our releases, that would not have been as easy to do.

Besides that, if your project consists of multiple projects that evolve at a different rate but are always released together, then a subversion tag ensures that you have a correct snapshot of all the projects at the time of the release, even if some of them haven't changed since the last release. If you use check-in comments to mark a release, you must make a check-in on each project, even if nothing has changed.
A tag is precisely made to be able to get the exact snapshot of the sources at the moment you created it. It is 1000000 times more convenient than looking at the submit comments....especially if your release requiered several commits (or more).

Furthermore, the case where a important bug is dicovered in acceptance or in **production** while the development is ongoing and not stable enough is quite common! 
In that case you have to create a branch. As others mentioned, a tag is beyond the scene a branch in SVN so you are saved in that case but tagging can also save your life with other tools because many tools allow you to create a branch from tag (CVS, TFS and certainly others).
Just try it with comments only!