No LED Pisses Me Off
It's such an obvious feature for many of us that used to use RIM devices (I'm not suggesting they invented it, but it became a requirement to blackberry users).
My Droid X has one. The iPhone I used to own was scrapped rather quickly because the notification was terrible. The E5 Nokia I own has one (albeit basic, but it works). RIM had it down to a science. The thing is, not everyone wants to have to constantly check their phone to see if they missed an email, text, or call. When it's sitting out on a desk, or some place where you store it overnight, you don't really want to constantly pick it up to check if a text came through. Many devices let you adjust the settings so that you can pick a color for texts, a different one for email, and yet another for a missed call. Something that probably costs very little in manufacturing is very important to a lot of people that rely on the visual cue. The best part is, if you don't like it, you can just disable it, on those devices. Everybody wins. But blaming the posters for being lazy because they keep their device on vibrate, and don't always want it in their pocket? That's just absurd. A part that costs less than a dollar to implement is a very reasonable requirement for many of us. Honestly, I would rather have an LED to notify me of missed messages than have a crummy camera attached to my phone. If I want to take a picture, I'll use a proper camera. I also opted out of a webcam on my laptop, in exchange for a more sophisticated wifi antenna. I guess some of us use these things for productivity, and not purely as toys.