I remember the woes on the Surface. But the following logic for these are identical. The Surface does have a USB port, meaning that you could plug in a flash drive and store more data on it without using onboard storage. The S4 still and does come with a MicroSD slot.
But aside the no hesitation on limited space, I think the advertising scheme needs to behave itself alot more. Especially with the S4 and all of its bloatware (still not gone away apparently) by Samsung, they had became incresingly infuriating. As a owner of an S2, I think this crap needs to cut itself or the reputation of themselves will just decline. But it's not Samsung alone. Other manufacturers also followed the suit before.
I'm not a big fan of MicroSD as storage in phones, because it's so fucking slow, but it's better than having no expansion at all. I'm still waiting for the first phone manufacturer to include a standard mSATA slot in a phone, not that would be gamechanger. Screw thin phones and ridiculous screens, powerful processor, full Fedora or Arch install, megabattery and mSATA is what I want. I find phones ridiculously expensive for what they are. Like 700 USD for a phone and you can't slap on you're own OS, I'm not doing that, I'd get a nice Huawei Y300 or something, Galaxy S2 performance with longer battery life and industry leading wifi reception for 150 bucks, and when phone specs become interesting, then I'll spend major bucks on them, but for the moment, I think phones suck to be honest, a Sony-Ericsson P900i did basically the same as trendy phones do now 10 years ago, I'm not impressed. Be serious, if Intel can make a NUC, they can also make a phone with the PC specs. Hell yeah, an x86 phone with Fedora or Arch, 16GB or RAM, and a large mSATA. I would spend a grand on that.
Micro SD isn't that fast but if you at least get a decent card like a class 10 it isn't too bad. I've got a Galaxy S3 with one and its usable. I think that manufacturers should be forced to show the "available" storage on any given device. While I do not watch movies on my phone it would be a good practice.
the first thing i do when i get a smartphone is root (if nessassary) and remove all the crap i'll never use (it's retarded how you usually have to root and do silly stuff to remove those application)
Samsung have seem to have gone overboard with added value software, but no smartphones comes with advertised space a 16gb iPhone 5 has about 14gb available and by the you start down the apps to make it as fully functioned as the samsung you woul proabably be left with the same space, it is tradion to lie about strorage space my 2tb hard drive in my pc has under 2tb of available storage by the time you add the bits os software you need to make run, that is was a 2tb harddirve to start with, most harddrive makers tend up round there figures. Also the harddrive makers define a GB as one billion bytes which is a lot less then a true GB.
I'm eyeing the S4 as my next phone, and that issue is not really an issue for me because there is expendable storage and most of the space on my current Galaxy Nexus is taken up by music - around 10 out of 12.8 usable. Plus, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna root and flash a custom ROM days after getting my hands on it. But I do agree that it is misleading advertising it as 16 gigs when only half is actually available for use.