Stumbled upon this post that talks about making async web requests.

Now simplicity aside, if in real world, all you do is make an async request and wait for it in the very next line, isn't that the same as making a sync call in the first place?

No, async + await != sync, because of continuation
From MSDN 'Asynchronous Programming with Async and Await (C# and Visual Basic)'

Async methods are intended to be non-blocking operations. An await
expression in an async method doesn’t block the current thread while
the awaited task is running. Instead, the expression signs up the rest
of the method as a continuation and returns control to the caller of
the async method.

For example async execution will not block UI thread, and Some TextBox.Text will be updated after download has finished
private async void OnButtonClick()
{
   SomeTextBox.Text = await new WebClient().DownloadStringTaskAsync("http://stackoverflow.com/");
}

