"Evils of Lookup FIelds"?

SO I've read a little thing that warns against using the
LOOKUP feature when designing tables. Apparently its not
good to assign values to a field based on values in
another table; better to just join the tables in a query
and get your values that way.

But what about using the VALUE LIST lookup option when
designing a table? This does not reference another table,
but you just type in the list of values from which you
want the user to select. For example, I might want to
limit data for a Status field to "Approved," "Pending."
and "Denied." SO rather than creating a separate table
for these 3 entries, I just type them in to the table
design, via the LOOKUP feature. Any harm in that?
(Thanks!)