I believe that most guy that I have encountered who have began learning music and think of music as being in a single key they begin to be stuck playing the music strictly using the notes in the scales, and there music is somewhat limited by it and they might not even be able to find a particular chord or lick because they are strictly confining their musical vocabulary to on particular scale. However, if you are to think of music as patterns and abstractly then it allows you to come up with different and unique ideas!
