I have this discussion with one of my friends on a regular basis. He's perfectly happy with his flip phone for the reasons you mentioned. Interestingly, he's a computer geek who likes to play with just about every electronic device out there. But he just wants a phone to make phone calls.
For me, it's not a phone. It's a small computer and camera on my belt that happens to also make the phone call. I use it for keeping notes and lists, taking photos (and instantly sending copies of photos to friends), listening to anything in my entire music collection or one of thousands of radio stations, using it as a timer, as an alarm clock, as a stopwatch, a decibel meter, a level, a map (with satellite photos) of anywhere in the world, a GPS system, a credit card scanner, and a web browser (where Google can help answer just about any question I might have about anything, anywhere). And about once or twice a day, I'll make a phone call on it, too.
I do text fairly often to exchange short bits of information that don't warrant the time needed to make a phone call, and the recipient doesn't have to drop what they're doing to answer the phone.