The one thing that really annoys me is that in the UK there's a 40 GBP difference between the 8GB and 16GB version. I'd rather pay extra for an SD card slot when I can get a 32GB class 10 SD card for around half that.
It seems like Google's deprecated external storage in Android. I'm under the impression they don't want to force the average user into seeing the filesystem, and they couldn't find a way to make ext. storage seamlessly coexist with onboard (apps, etc.) without showing the FS.
If I'm not mistaken (it happens often) the exclusion of external storage was to avoid paying licensing costs for FAT/FAT32. So really just to keep the price down.
Optional external storage doesn't force anyone into anything. You can live in long-term bliss with a device having an SD card slot having never plugged a memory card in.
Having said that it does seem that Google is trying to move away from external storage, likely to try to recover from the horrendous original implementation of it (still one of the nastiest, ugliest parts of Android). The original intent of external storage was largely as a read mechanism allowing you to plug in a card with your entire music collection, etc. When it got delegated to read/write needs, primarily because early devices had ridiculously low internal storage, things fell apart.
