I totally agree actually, and not just because I want to justify my purchase
This phone is very fast, there's hardly any lag performing any function or opening any program. The keyboard is much nicer than many professional reviews led me to believe and for a "low end" WinMo phone it's extremely feature packed.
My biggest complaint is that it look a bit of digging and research to set the phone up to be 100% utilized, but that's par for the course for any Microsoft product. Nearly every concern I had from a software perspective was addressed with some tweaking, hacking an a new browser. If it wouldn't have made my plan 2x as expensive I might have gotten the Pre, but for 50 bucks upgrade price(bestbuy, in-store), I'm not looking back.