I know the MicroSD people always hate to hear this, but quite frankly it is barely used and only a request from a tiny fraction of customers. The reason that low end phones tend to have it is because they include a paltry amount of base storage essentially necessitating the customer pay for storage themselves via MicroSD. When I was internal to MS I believe the figure was about 6% of users who had a SD slot actually populated it, and a significant number of them never ended up saving anything of it. That may not jive to your anecdotal experiences, but the vast majority of smartphone users, especially now, are not the power users that many of you and your friends are.
I don't oppose MicroSD, mind you. But I absolutely understand why they do not want to add the cost of a feature that almost no one actually uses. That is unfair to the rest of the users paying for a feature that seldom used.
The same thing goes for removable batteries, at the risk of getting myself yelled at by a second vocal minority.