It's funny that actually many students believe that the symbiosis is always the other way around, i.e. derivatives are used to compute limits (l'Hopital etc.). My favorite example of an elegant calculation of a derivative using the limit definition comes from basic physics. Ask the students why the acceleration of an object performing uniform circular motion is always perpendicular to the velocity. One could come up with a non-elegant solution by writing the equations of motion and using a derivatives table, or one could observe the nice geometric proof of considering an infinitesimal isosceles triangle formed by the two velocity vectors that are a few seconds apart and notice that $\Delta \vec{v}$ is the base of this triangle and points toward the center of the circle.