Carsten,
I think for the more casual shooter or the pros that do mostly one thing, your comments about setting things up beforehand works very well. However, if you ever have to do a lot of photojournalist style shooting (even weddings now), you are moving from good to marginal to horrid lighting very quickly, so things can change dramatically. And PJs and sports shooters themselves have very differing demands. Sometimes they need to get a small JPEG out right NOW for broadcast. (I watched the Preakness this weekend, and at the news break just after the race, there were a couple of shots of the philly winning being displayed. That takes immediate download via WiFi and similarly near instant upload to the wire services. No time for processing, or even resizing. Sending a small JPEG to one service while planning a larger JPEG of the next shot to another service and still collecting the RAW shots for later magazine publications is pretty normal nowadays.)
Besides, the Nikons and Canons are selling to a much, much larger base of users, so familiarity and demand is probably much broader than what is normally seen is MF, with respect to controls and operation. Not saying one is better or worse than the other, but the user bases for the gear may be dramatically different. Buttons are good for folks that may not have a lot of familiarity with menus and programable stuff. Less buttons is sleek, but it does require a bit more investment in learning the camera system, and as we all know, lots of folks never read the manual ;-)
Personally, I know I can get used to whatever I need to use. I might complain and curse a few times early on, but it all becomes second nature rather quickly. The more you use it, the more familiar and easy it becomes, regardless of the set-up.
LJ