I'm not saying I like the idea, but Microsoft's way of handling SD cards is a solution for all of these issues. When you put an SD card in a Windows Phone, it becomes part of the internal storage in a way akin to Windows 8 storage spaces. There's no picking where a file goes, it just goes to internal storage which includes the SD card.
The major drawback of the way Microsoft did it is that if you take the card out of the phone, the phone needs to be reformatted and the card cannnot easily be reused.
That sounds much, much worse. I'd take no SD card support at all over having to explain to people why, when they take their card out of the phone and put it in their camera, their phone shits itself.
The last phone I had that did this was an old Samsung Focus, and Samsung was very quick to point this out at every step of the way. The emphasize in the manual very clearly that this storage is a permanent addition, not a way of removable storage.
Is it any different from telling people if they unplug their desktop's boot drive, the computer will stop working?
People don't have an expectation of hard drives being removable(most people probably don't even realize they can be removed), whereas SD cards are explicitly designed to be mobile. People treat them as mini USB drives, so this behaviour is directly counter to most people's intuition, regardless of its technical merits.
What are the numbers of people swapping their SD cards out of their phone and into something else (and expecting it to work)? I don't know the statistics, but I'm willing to bet it's low. In fact, the number of people in general putting SD cards into their phones is likely to be very low, since a lot of phones don't support it.
I really don't understand your argument that phones just shouldn't support SD cards rather than having the option to expand the storage for cheaper than buying the next model up just to avoid user confusion. If every phone locked out useful features just for the sake of avoiding user confusion, Android wouldn't exist.
How is it not a solution? The problem is needing to add more storage. Microsoft lets you add more storage. That way you could buy the 8GB version of the phone for $200 and add 64GB of more storage, if necessary, for $50. The alternative is to pay $200 for 8GB or $350 for 16GB... which would you pick?
Removable storage is always going to be a problem, as Google points out. Adding storage after the fact is solved, and one of the solutions is what Microsoft offers.
Lots of hate for this idea, but makes perfect sense to me. I could buy an 8GB phone, decide later that I need more storage, then expand that with a 32GB SD card. No confusion as long as it's explained that the card is for expansion, not removal.
The major drawback of the way Microsoft did it is that if you take the card out of the phone, the phone needs to be reformatted and the card cannnot easily be reused.