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At the moment I'm using a mix of the two; usually try to use the same amout of crease for edges that create symmetry in a mesh and loop cuts when I need to add stuff to said mesh. I'm not familiar with the inner workings of blender and have not created any models where the difference might be noticeable.
Is using mean crease cheaper (vertex-wise) than loop cuts?
Yes, it is always cheaper at the same level of subdiv. However, it's often necessary to turn the subdiv levels up in order to get the same visual quality as using loops, and in that case it becomes exponentially more expensive. I'll generally only use creases for small and relatively unimportant details where the difference in quality is negligible.
In addition to what has been said by Jonathan L, its also worth to note what creases are complitely software dependant data. You can export smoothgroups (hard edges), you unwrap data are also export without a problem, but information like creases are only exist in specific software file format. So the only way to export any subd model maded with creases to other software is apply subd modifier first, cause otherwice results will be different in both software. In production modellers sometimes have restrictions to use creases at all because of that.
