I love cutaway models, and it has nothing to do with looks. It has to do with ease of access to the upper frets, and not just past 12, it's less crowding of your hand when working up there.
Ukes, particularly with re-entrant tuning, have a very limited scale range, and it's nice to be able to easily use all you can get without having to get into awkward fingering positions working around the body. The cutaway just makes getting up there a little easier. Even if the number of frets is the same, getting to them easily is nice. Of course, (seeing the earlier post), if there are no frets up there, then having a cutout would be silly, but most have frets going up past where the body joins.