The speed of the SD is far more limiting than the speed of the card reader itself, even for USB2.0.
As for whether I consider the nuances of "real life," I traveled by land across several countries with a DSLR, and took hundreds of photos a week. My DSLR has a CF slot and an SD slot; I used the SD slot for a wifi chip, and saved all photos to CF. My CF reader hasn't gotten lost or broken, and I didn't have "an entourage of assistants doing the heavy lifting" (whatever that means when talking about a card reader).
In real life, you can just use an external card reader. It's not a big limitation, just like it's not a big limitation that laptops these days don't have optical drives.
USB 2.0 tops out at a theoretical 60MB/s, and in reality it is much slower, far below the read speeds of fast SD cards.
I appreciate that it’s good enough under some circumstances, but not always. Certainly not when taking several cards worth of photos a day, with only very limited time to do transfer, selection, and editing.
As for whether I consider the nuances of "real life," I traveled by land across several countries with a DSLR, and took hundreds of photos a week. My DSLR has a CF slot and an SD slot; I used the SD slot for a wifi chip, and saved all photos to CF. My CF reader hasn't gotten lost or broken, and I didn't have "an entourage of assistants doing the heavy lifting" (whatever that means when talking about a card reader).
In real life, you can just use an external card reader. It's not a big limitation, just like it's not a big limitation that laptops these days don't have optical drives.