The eMMC is great, but it indeed contributes to costs. I am glad PI got a less problematic storage support. Making a flash disk image and burning it should not be that hard, you just need an adapter to plug it into usb. If they will make possible to boot from disk without all the crap (boot.txt) flashing will be super easy and less engaging for end users.
For these who wish to have both emmc and m2 option I can recommend other hardware I been playing around: URVE Board RPI - rpi3+ hardware replacement.