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I think the following pages do great at explaining the advantages so I'll just provide links:

http://www.ros.org/is-ros-for-me/

http://www.ros.org/core-components/

http://www.ros.org/integration/

As for disadvantages, many of them are being addressed in ROS 2.0, you can read more about that here (specifically this article).

Personally, I'd add that it not being cross-platform is a disadvantage. While there are ways to use it with Windows, OSX, and even Andriod, those operating systems are not currently fully supported.