Necessary? No. But, if you want any sort of "film-look" or small amounts of motion blur (vs choppy very sharp looking motion) you need to run a shutter 1/180 or lower. You can only stop down your aperture so much too, past about f16 the image becomes less sharp. Sure, you could go iso 100 f22 and 1/500-1/1000 shutter and you'll be correctly exposed on a sunny day, but with a 1.2ND (4 stops of light, 1/16) you could run a shutter of 1/125 aperture f8 and it'd may look better to some people.
I use a 1.2ND for any ski stuff in the sun, I like shooting 1/125 or 1/180 for 60fps and like keeping my aperture in the "ideal range" of f5.6-f11.