What makes linked lists cool is that you can easily modify the list. Suppose you want to drop the first entry. With the pointer you can just update the pointer and free the first entry. Inserting a new entry at the top is just as easy. But if you are maintaining a specific top entry, you must update the entry to change the top of the list.
Even if you certain that you will never want to change to top of this linked list, at others times you will want to be able to do this. You should use one method to handle all linked lists to minimize confusion.