This depends on the geographical constraints...

A lay person in a developing country comparing 2 flagships will check memory over SoC specs while in a developed country it may be opposite...

Even here in Singapore the main reasons the SGS3 outsells the HTC One X by almost 5:1 ratio is the replaceable battery, storage size and lastly the galaxy brand name...

Here the first galaxy to make it big was the SGS2 due to the screen, battery and micro sd slot in a crowd that had almost totally adopted the iphone...The S3 continues capturing the iphone's market for these reasons just like the Note has been doing...

In short, we can't generalize even when it comes to lay people...

Yup the Nexus 7 is selling well; let's see how the Nexus 4 does compared to competing flagships now that Google has really brought the price to a very competitive level...

Well, first, it's not that odd that you have other usage patterns than me or the younger you.

However, cloud services isn't nearly as good as physical access. For me. Let me break it down into a few key areas, to demonstrate:

- data size:
As I said, I have digitalized thirty-something gigabytes with music, with a few leftover CDs that remain to be digitalized. For full access to that, I'd need a 64 GB phone, a 64 GB SD card, or a 40 GB cloud service. 64 GB phone = much more expensive than a 16 GB phone, cloud can be free.

- data sub:
I have the cheapest abo for my usage. I pay about £5 a month for 100 MB data traffic. That's pretty much all used on Android updates. On top of that, I pay for phone usage. That's like £3 for me. I'm not willing to jump on to an much more expensive unlimited data subscription when my phone, after all, only cost me about £3 for the primary task.

- data reception:
I drive about 30 minutes in low traffic, up to an hour in the rush, to work. Parts of that drive is under a mountain wall. I don't even have acceptable local FM radio access there, much less 3G. Pocket held 3G isn't good in cars anywhere, really. Having music in the car, especially in these areas where the radio fails, would be the reason to have music in the phone. Streaming is useless where I need it the most.

- cloud is cloud:
Why take something valuable that should be accessed locally, and trust someone half a world away whose primary interest is to earn money on you to store it for free? Why should I have to trust their security when I can keep it in my own pocket? It's a total waste of bandwidth, energy, power, cell phone battery and really must be like the least effective way to get my music from my storage to my playback device. Which is the phone, that perfectly well can store it. If it has a SD card reader.

A SD card reader is a very simple fix, cloud is like travelling to the moon for sand. It would increase my expenses, administration, risk of failure and at the end there's a whole lot of radiation.

You know, no matter how you twist and turn that explanation, there's just no way it holds water:

- If you take away the SD card, you STILL have to decide a place to store your music. There's STILL a file system to place it in.

- If you DON'T take away the SD card, you don't have to use it. You do NOT have to consider if the files are stored there or elsewhere.

- There is no direct correlation between the number of physical storage locations and numbers of directories/places to store data. Especially in a Linux file system. You can have as many or few file directories as you want, except for the default system folders, that are indeed already many enough to confuse anyone if they'd not make some pretend point of the one extra /sdcard folder.

So the point hardly even makes sense even from a marketing point of view. It only makes Android look unorganized as a whole.

That's completely wrong. On mobile devices, for a given application, you always store files in the same place (the user doesn't have to know where), on a given media => if you have two storage devices, then, you cannot do it without user input anymore.
Example, on the N900, you can save pictures from the camera either in MyDocs or in the sd card. But you don't choose which folder in MyDocs or the SD card is used, which is perfectly normal/good practice/expected.
The file system is (and should be) completely transparent to the user. Storing files on a removable or fix media isn't.

My issue with the nexus is not the lack of sd slot, but the lack of internal memory. I would have bought it with 32 or 64Gb.

i always thought it would be nice to have an sd card to store things like music and pictures and what **** i put on there and not whatever **** android decides to put on there. that's a very stupid explanation proving that it's not a smartphone, it's a dumbphone for dumb users.

I cannot take people's music collections seriously if they can fit it all on an SD card. Mine is about 260GB, growing about 1-2GB each month.

Well DUH! An SD card MAKES a smartphone! No SD card = NO SMARTPHONE!!!!111

Just like the N9 is a dumphone! The only REAL SMARTH PHONE IS TEH N900!!1111

Exactly! That's the point for the micro sd card slot...The whole point here is of the measly internal storage which could have been supplemented with a micro sd card slot...If it was even 32GB internal it would be acceptable to some...Although without an micro sd slot 64GB is quite useful...

I like using SD card for back ups and for large img file. For example I have 4GB img of ubuntu on galaxy note. Further, I would prefer you could swap them in and out without removing the back cover.

With an internal 32GB memory ...you get maybe 25-29GB of space.
With an external SD slot ...you basically get unlimited memory.

Run out of space on your 25GBs of space? Too bad!
Want another movie, home video, TV Show, emulator games? Just slot in that extra microSD card that's stashed in your wallet!

I've been doing it for years, and its so much more practical than Dropbox and fixes the shortcomings of large files/many content/anemic internals.