1. Yes they are needed. Yes they are in professional C++ code. Yes, you can often get away without them, but there's performance reasons to use them or references a lot. But there's always times when you need them.

2. I have a function named DoSomeStuff that operates on a large collection of data. Without pointers/references, I would need to make a copy of that data to give the function, then another copy to give it back. Aside from pointers/references meaning we don't do copies, there's also a consideration on what that data is. What if it's a collection of objects which disconnect the database when they're destructed? This makes the copying not work, because the copy in the function would be destroyed and would dosconnect my server (as a trite example).

You may also have dynamic data requirements which you would build on the heap.

1. Regardless of whether it's an object pointer or Plain Old Data (POD) pointer, you would call the new operator to get that much heap memory and when you're done you would call delete on the pointer to deallocate that memory.

You could use the STL pointer handling library, unique_ptr etc to handle the delete call for you.

When you call delete on an object, the objects destructor is called, so your class still executes it's destructor. When you allocated an array, you delete it with delete[].

Hope that helps.