MMS may be a band-aid, but as long as there isn't a widespread standard for doing the same over the internet, it's necessary. IM and email coexist and serve different purposes, so there's not much sense in telling users to use another service. Hopefully Nokia will have some dev time available to fix it soon, and I can understand why it's a low priority.

This would actually be a good opportunity to leverage Ovi to implement identical functionality over modern protocols.