Cell Phone Services

I have a Sprint cell phone with a camera.  I took some pictures
that I want to get out of the phone and I am watching them slowly download
now.

Could the cell vendors make this more of a pain?  If I want to send
a picture, it doesn’t just travel to another phone, but it uploaded to “my”
personal website on their servers and then the recipient gets a message with a URL
in it to see the pic.

In order to skip all of this foolishness and not use the on line services
of the phone, I purchased a cable and software from DataPilot which
works OK, but has a terrible UI.

Why can’t I just slide a memory card in and out of my phone?  Is
it really that valuable to the service providers to make me just through all of their
stupid hoops in order to get my pictures?