Paddy,
While I agree with most of what you say, I do have an 11 in 1 card reader in my Macbook Pro as I type this. It works great, but as you have already said, It is too small for a Compact Flash Card. It works fine for me since I bought my Canon SD500. I also have an original s100 that uses compact flash so.... a usb reader is necessary for that. I do wonder why they didn't go with the 54mm slot so that pros using digital SLRs and compact flash cards would not be left out?
Steve