Oh yes, bitcoin has always had the option of transaction fees, i think it's 0 now? But when promoting bitcoin, people often claim there will be none, or money can be tranfered for free.
There can and there are. When you start using bitcoin (with exchangers like Mt.Gox and with the satoshi client, and community in #bitcoin-otc) you learn quickly that paying a fee is a way to get more miners to pay attention to your block, but that your tx will likely go through without any fee.
Some day it's possible that you will have to mine a block to publish your own transactions! Not likely though, there will always be people willing to take less money to do it for you. And you're both right, if you start taking away the features then it undermines the advantages that generally bring users to bitcoin. Who knows what will happen. It's a software system with majority rules.
This lets you predict how long your transaction will take based on the amount sent and the fee attached. It does not consider coin age, minimum transaction fees, or kb transaction size.
