yes microsd cards cost money but I assure you, you are paying more per GB from the phone manufacturer than your microsd purchase. As far as speed goes, a lot of these phones' internal memory is nothing more than a glorified soldered-on SD card (as opposed to NAND).

You are entitled to your own opinions, however if you are comparing to the N900 or N97, need I not remind you of the measly capacity that Nokia allots for the OS (and applications) leaving the rest of the ~32GB for media ONLY (the community had to come up with optifying packages and that's not a real solution).

I'd rather have the entire memory be microsd personally, at least then it's easier to backup (not to mention hack/modify) as well as I can take my microsd card and use it in all my devices (with adapters as required) if need be.