The point (or one of the points?) of the gamma correction is that each step is perceived to be about equal to the eye, so all of the 256 levels (8bit) are worth the same. Converting to linear light will greatly stretch the bright end of the scale and compress the dark, so that a lot of bits are wasted on bright areas (lots of levels unused) and information is lost in dark areas because too many levels are squeezed into too few boxes. That's why the conversion is done in 16 bits, to increase the number of "boxes" so that information isn't lost. You could of course convert that into regular 8bit RGB for testing purposes, to have more compatible filters available, but remember that heavy banding will appear in dark areas because the effective bitdepth there is reduced.
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