The Miles Burnyeat interview available in the supplemental materials on Blackboard offers a number of good insights about what the dialogue is all about, both for Plato and as a form of inquiry in its own right. Because it's a video, it's difficult to cite specifically, so my ideas are probably mixed in with those presented by Burnyeat (sort of like we're schizophrenically in digitized dialogue).
The dialogue creates a common ground where ideas can be discussed in pure form, at least in theory. I like that the Phaedrus opens with Socrates and Phaedrus looking for a suitable spot to have a discussion, under a "lofty and spreading plane-tree" (loc. 691-99). I don't know enough about the various references, for example the digression about Boreas, but I wonder if Plato is trying to say something here, either about the neutrality of place or its inevitable bias. It's hard for me to say. Maybe it's just a convention. (Though there is this: "I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country" (loc. 699-705). There's a pretty significant statement about place.)
That it's a dialogue implies that there is not necessarily a power relation. The two people speaking are both equally capable of presenting valid ideas. Of course, in a Socratic dialogue, this is an illusion. Despite all the fawning charm--"My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide"--there's never any doubt that Socrates will be the "winner," and that this has been a contest all along. The added layer is that Plato is presenting all of this with his own agenda in mind. Burnyeat's take, if I'm representing it correctly, is that over time Socrates becomes more and more of a mouthpiece for Plato, who becomes more confident in his own ideas. Burnyeat thinks that the early dialogues are more of an attempt to validate and redeem Socrates after his death.
The dialogue then is a really useful trick for Plato. It allows him to express his ideas without actually having to answer for them. The form, and the fact of Socrates' life and influence, allows Plato to say, "Hey, he said it. Not me." And it's great that he does this in writing. Socrates dismisses writing, and his pupil adopts it at least in part because it allows him to, like a text, not have to answer for himself.
I wonder too if there might be some angst simply about the technology of writing. Hesiod and Homer, depending on which estimates you look at, only lived a few hundred years before Socrates, and the spread of that technology (writing stuff down), and its required literacy, was probably quite slow and mediated by factors such as region, class, sex, and so forth (sound familiar?). So if Socrates was this brilliant eccentric, it may be that he was just plain illiterate. Or maybe he distrusted writing in the way that many archetypal grandparents distrust the InterWebs.
But in Plato's hands, the only hands we have (because they wrote), it's something different. It's a philosophical point about the loss of meaning between what's represented in writing (the painting) and what actually is (the image the painting depicts). (Of course this happens in speaking, too! It happens as long as we're using language.) So Socrates' point is that a "living, breathing" person can defend his or her ideas in spoken dialogue, whereas the written word loses this authority and becomes utterly static.
There's something to be said here too about the simple pleasure of good conversation. I like that Socrates would prefer to chat you up over a beer rather than write treatises. There's a "down-home" charm here that's irresistible. (But then I find that I often have the opposite bias: what I say is so sloppy and regrettable; I have so much more control over what I write.)
And not only good conversation but good presentation. And these were all such central concerns of the sophists, why would Plato send Socrates after them? The Socrates of the Phaedrus is a sophist, it seems to me.
I think history shows that dialogue and writing are not competing forces. They work together quite nicely. The tradition of Westsern philosophy serves as evidence of this. And written texts aren't static. They're constantly reinterpreted, challenged, and built upon.
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