The card reader was killed because people were using them to expand the nose-bleedingly expensive to upgrade soldered on 128k hard drives. Apple's seeking to drive up the selling price without adding quality.
I tried using a really fast and expensive 128GB card as extended storage. They're pretty much unusable, slower than a fast USB3 stick, and less practical than a Samsung T1 SSD or something like that.
I don't mind the lack of an SD slot, but I won't buy another Macbook Pro until there's 32GB of memory. I have a late-2013 Haswell MBP with an OWC-upgraded SSD, and I prefer it over my work computer, a 32GB maxed-out Thinkpad running Linux... in pretty much every aspect.
