I don't think that having a button clearly labeled "ISO" is over anyone's head! LOL!!!
Are you sure you were looking at a D80? My D80 has a button clearly labelled ISO -- its on the back, left side, second from the bottom. I use it constantly for fast ISO changes.
I'm not debating the D200 has significantly better controls, but wondering if your impression might be from an older model -- the D80 is pretty complete unless you're a professional -- I have instant access to metering mode (spot/centre weighted etc), auto focus mode, ISO, flash mode, and bracketing off of buttons on the camera body. That covers at least 95% of the setting changes I make in the field. (there's more, but I don't use things like WB adjust -- that's covered in the raw processing after, and EV compensation is useless for manual exposure)
After having just spent 2 weeks with a D80 in Fiji and Australia, I echo the sentiment that its a great camera -- my impressions were:
1) It has enough buttons that I didn't have to go into the menus even in wildly changing conditions (taking a cablecar from skyskapes into rainforest).
2) I really stretched the dynamic range to its limits, but as long as you were careful -- manual metering, check the RGB histogram constantly, and ensure the sun wasn't in your frame -- it had just enough range to capture landscape / forest detail without blowing out the clouds. There were only few case where I just could not do it, and either had to (usually) sacrifice some detail in the dark or blow out some cloud detail.
3) As long as I was careful not to underexpose I could push it to ISO 800 without distracting noise, to 1600 and -- in one notable occasion -- to 3200 to capture images I simply would not have been able to otherwise.
You could certainly do a lot worse selecting a camera!
