Yes, SD access would be nice. On my new Samsung Galaxy S111, this would really be nice because the SD on Samsung is not amendable to sending applications to the card.
For all of you that can't access the external SD card for one reason or another and have a rooted phone, just install ICS SD Binder from the play store.
you can do it on cm9........you have an option called use internal storage in settings-storage-then press option button........then reboot into recovery mode go to mounts and storage-mount all the things.....then come back to advance settings of cwm then select fix permissions