I saw the Midnight M2 Air at the Apple Store last night, and even though it was covered with an insane amount of manhandled fingerprints, it's still a gorgeous color if you're a fan of dark blue. They wipe off very easily.
As for the SSD, perhaps it was more of a supply thing than a deliberate cost-cutting measure. While I wish Apple would have left the price at $999, or equiped the $1199 base model with 512GB SSD as a workaround, I think this is being blown out of proportion and most people will never feel a hit in performance.
Also, I cannot imagine having a MacBook with only 256GB of storage. Real world capacity after formatting, macOS's footprint, updates, and the growing size of apps, photos and videos (even if most are in the cloud), not to mention the need for available space for OS upgrades, 256GB is just not enough in my view. But, to each their own.