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Ultimately, sources need to be based on primary, or original, records. The ability to seeking out such original records, when cited, is essential for controlling the quality of genealogical conclusions. It is, however, a time consuming process, and in many cases is neither practical nor possible. Not practical because the original sources on which something is based are often housed in locations that most of us can not reasonably be expected to go to examine them. For example, I make extensive use of the documents contained in repositories such as the Draper Manuscript Collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society. Access to these documents is limited in practice, since this would require going to the Wisconsin Historical Society to view them. However, there are excellent transcriptions of some of these documents available in the literature, and these translations can be effectively used as surrogate's for seeing the original documents. In addition, the WHS makes microfilm copies of many of their works available, and these also serve as surrogate's for the original.
In some cases, access to the original documents is simply not possible. For example, the general public may not be allowed to examine the original documents, depending on the repositories policies. In some cases, the original documents may no longer exist, though they may be preserved in microfilm'ed versions, or in manual extracts and abstrcts. In these cases, there is simply no alternative but to use microfilm, abstracts, extracts, etc as surrogate's for the originals.
Use of such surrogates is NOT the same thing as useing the orignials, though the distinction is not often made by genealogists. When using surrogates there is always potential for the loss of information. For most purposes such surrogates can be used effectively, as long as its clear from the presentation that a derivitive source is being utilized, and not the original.
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