Two reasons:
Security & Performance.
NT4 is not very secure at the best of times. I have not come across security issues having exchange on a BDC, but I do not have web-access or RAS enabled. You can overcome most concerns by going to sunbelt software & get a trial-ware download of a piece of software that fixes the top 1000 known volnerabilities of NT & 2000. Most of the fixes are 'Press this button to fix it'.
Performance for me has not been an issue, but the BDC I am running exchange on has 1/2Gb of RAM (v.cheap these days) 2xPentiii 866, I only have 50 users, & the only other thing this server does is a little file serving.
If you don't have many users relative to the capacity of the hardware, then security is your only concern.
However a DC also makes it harder to migrate Exchange 5.5 later to another box. I don't know how much harder it is to upgrade to 2000.
Exchange needs decent access to a DC for the user database for security reasons. Therefore putting it on a member server increases network traffic.
A PDC does logon validation and all sorts so putting a massive strain on it by giving it Exchange will slow everything down which is not what you want with an Exchange server.
Get a PDC doing its normal job and Exchange on a BDC.
Your PDC can be a little P II 400 desktop - doesn't have to be an Enterprise server.
If you really are a little company, then make sure your server runs RAID 5 disks and gets backed up properly every day. Then stick loads of RAM in it and an appropriate processor and you may be ok.
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