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[Jelle]

The only real advantages is silver barb and that evil surface spider can't get his name for silk.
Also I suppose you could use the local dead wildlife to repel goblins.

[Mickey Blue]

As others have said, while there are a few things that you can only get/see on evil biomes it isn't in itself a 'reward' as these things are not quantitatively better then other items from other places (like regular, good biomes, etc).

Really the benefit comes in two flavors:

1) They (theoretically*) offer more of a challenge, which can be nice for veteran players to get a bit more difficulty and nice for new players (I played on evil all the time once I got the basics down) to give them a thrill of danger.  Think of some of the different biomes as the games 'difficulty setting', with regular/good ones at easy, untamed/evil at medium, glacier at hard, and desert/tundra at very hard (though with the advent of caverns, solving the "Well where do I get water??!?" problem they aren't so terrible anymore).

2) Immersion; one of the great feats of Dwarf Fortress (to me) is that it proves that you don't need good graphics (in fact you barely need graphics at all..) to have a truly immersive game.  For all the tens of millions of dollars that were thrown at games like Fallout III, Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, etc, none came even nearly as close to being as immersive as Dwarf Fortress is (not saying they aren't great games in their own right).  If immersion is your thing then sometimes the mental image of your dwarves trying to scrape by in a scorching desert, ride out a storm in a frozen wasteland, or yes defend their fledgling community from undead hordes in an evil forest can really add a huge amount (much more then any random feature) to your playing experience.

So there you go, in short there are some minor unique things to each type of zone but generally they don't serve to make one zone measurably 'better' then others, its all about challenge and immersion.

-MB

*While evil zones are not exactly a walk in the park, the 'nerfing' of the undead in the current game version has taken a lot of the bite out of them.  Undead monsters used to be very difficult to kill by virtue of having no organs/blood/etc.  You basically had to reduce them to dust to finish them off, and while they weren't exactly strong attackers either, the fact that it simply took so long to bring them down could create issues.  These days they are one of the few creatures in DF that have a true 'health bar' (from what I understand) so they tend to drop extremely fast even at the hands of untrained militia (I'm speaking of general undead monsters, there are no doubt exceptions).