I like the switch as well, as it's been the easiest phone I have owned to quickly throw into silent mode. The one downside that I can see to it is the inability to have a location/time aware ringer though. A friend of mine had this on his old Symbian phone, where he could have it go to silent automatically at specific times, or in specific locations. His phone didn't have GPS, but it could keep track of the cell towers and signal strength to estimate where he was. If he went to the movies, his phone switched to silent automatically.

I suppose this might be possible still on the iPhone where the software overrides what the switch says, but it would also require running an app in the background. Thats still a nono in iPhone land sadly. It would be nice if they could open it up a little bit, like offering crontab like functions when the phone is not actively being used.