This seems odd to me, as a consumer I remember the days before USB was around, and it _really_ sucked. Maybe USB is less lovely if you are a driver developer, but thats because its pushing more work away from the consumer and onto the driver developer. As a consumer, USB has been pretty awesome.
edit: I suppose you could argue that something much better than USB could have been possible, but thats how it is with technology, the standard that takes off isn't necessarily the best, its just one thats _good enough_ and gets traction somehow.
Developing USB drivers is actually totally fantastically easy nowadays with libusb(x). You can more-or-less just pretend your USB device is a server you talk to through a socket. No need to even write a single line of kernel-code, you can do it all in python in userland, if you so desire.
For many USB devices this is also a totally feasible thing to do, too, because most USB devices that are not providing some standard interface that the operating system takes care of (keyboard, mice, controllers, tablets, mass-storage, ...) just provide some sort of service that typically only one application would interact with, so just having the driver inside that application that interacts with it works well.
edit: I suppose you could argue that something much better than USB could have been possible, but thats how it is with technology, the standard that takes off isn't necessarily the best, its just one thats _good enough_ and gets traction somehow.