Yes, well said! While technically thunderbolt can be VERY fast because it essentially has a direct line to the processor, the added complexity of each device needing its own controller, and the cost of those controllers is prohibitive to replace something as cheap as USB.
The thing that drives me insane is how sheep like everyone is being about thunderbolt. I feel like droves of people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars just to SAY they use the thunderbolt port.
While i'm probably not the average user, Apple has been taking multiple steps backwards as of late. Granted they are more popular, "successfully", than ever and making money hand over fist but I think some decisions might bite them later. Thunderbolt related, they've essentially combined their expresscard slot and mini display port into thunderbolt. Most people I've read on here using thunderbolt drives do so with a $150 thunderbolt to expresscard 34 adapter, then $20 expresscard to esata adapter, then their esata enclosure.
That setup sucks for a number of reasons.
The first is the price. I still use an 06 MBP (64 bit core 2 duo), and that had expresscard built in (as it should for a computer over $1500).
The second is the speed which is bottlenecked to expresscard 34, nullifying any benefits of using thunderbolt but adding in the con of tieing up your display output.
The third is the size and extendability. With expresscard built in, the adapters fit flush in your computer. Furthermore you can swap out whatever you want... esata port, sd card reader, external gpu enclosure etc.
In general Apple is moving towards a more singular and modal interface (see osx lion). For someone like me that sucks a lot. My most used application is a terminal window and I need MANY of them at once. Multiple ssh session to a server, different modules and scripts of a program, debugging output etc. I currently use a triplehead2go through my 06 MBP dual link DVI. That gives me three screens plus my laptop display. Then, if i'm at work and need more displays or coding for GPU stuff (bitcoins, passwords, encoding etc) I can plug in a FULL desktop gpu through expresscard AND STILL use my dvi port for anything else. That's ridiculous! I can literally run 6 screens from my laptop! For me that's sublime. Yet Apple seems to be going away from multitasking and catering to single task, single screen applications. Again personally that's too 1995 for me
