I have to agree. Its a great device which does many important things my N810 wasn't able to fulfill.

It doesn't have a touchscreen. The internal GPS is good (enough), and can be exported with ExtGPS. Don't like 2.5 mm headphones requirement though. And the VPN client is archaic, I think it only supports IPsec, PPTP; not L2PP and OpenVPN. Setting up a tunnel with SSH from command line is easy but since you don't get POSIX with UNIX framework easily running you cannot simply get that or something like OpenVPN working. Hmm, and no Carman. The processor is weaker than N8x0, I think, but for me its good and so is the battery life. There is also good navigation software available for S60.

All in all, E71 is a great device for me, much for the same reasons you mentioned. Hardware-wise I've compared it with iPod touch 2nd gen and Nokia N810 elsewhere. It is not necessarily only the Nokia E71 which is great. The device has been remarkably well received even in consumer market (for which it was originally not marketed). Nokia has used the design of this device for further development such as Nokia E63 and Nokia E66.