Disabling pings has two advantages: First, it adds extra stealth if you're running one of the more stealthy attacks, and secondly it allows Nmap to scan hosts which don't reply to pings (ordinarily, Nmap would report those hosts as being "down" and not scan them).
In conjunction with -PT, you can use -PS to send SYN packets instead of ACK packets for your TCP Ping.
The -PU option (with optional port list after) sends UDP packets for your "ping". This may be best to send to suspected-closed ports rather than open ones, since open UDP ports tend not to respond to zero-length UDP packets.
Other ping types are -PE (Standard ICMP Echo Request), -PP (ICMP Timestamp Request), -PM (Netmask Request) and -PB (default, uses both ICMP Echo Request and TCP ping, with ACK packets)