The Macbook (and iBooks before it) have never had an ExpressCard or CardBus slot. It's only been a feature in the pro laptops.

As for Firewire, yeah, it will impact some people. Overall though, firewire is on it's way out, with most newer consumer camcorders using USB instead. For me, the biggest disappointment with both the Air and Unibody Macbook is the inability to put them into target disk mode, a feature present in nearly every Apple laptop even during the SCSI days.

Apple did keep the firewire port though on the recently revised white Macbook.