The idea of active cooling in power supplies is mainly for reliability, due to the huge variation in environments they operate in. Sure your high performance PSU may not need active cooling during the winter or in cold countries but as soon as you think of some of the temperatures that places in the USA or even in the UK hit during summer the lack of a fan will cause problems.
Passive power supplies are therefore quite hard to get right and many of the higher end models require careful thought about the case air flow. I've owned a few and they have a habit of dying. A passive PSU may sound like a good idea but often it is a hard to perfect. Most PSUs these days thankfully use very large low RPM fans, so noise is less of an issue.
Unless you are talking about a studio or audio system (or anything else where noise output is detrimental), I'd honestly never recommend one and even then there are active PSUs with extremely low noise profiles.
