AppleTalk is not an "inferior" protocol at all. It is designed for simplicity and convenience on a local area network, and does the job quite well. TCP/IP never matched the convenience of AppleTalk on a LAN until Apple recently introduced Rendevous. Modern servers and clients support AppleShare over IP, which provides the convenience of finding and logging into servers using AppleTalk, then actually transferring data using IP for higher throughput.
AppleShare whether over IP or AppleTalk is known as AppleShare Filing Protocol (AFP).
I knew that there was some connection between rendez vous and appletallk...
Of course you are absolutely right about appletalk being a lot more user friendly, in that it is superiour to tcp/ip. But it also has disadvantages, the main disadvantage being a lack of speed and the fact that modern hubs seem better at handling tcp/ip than appletalk. In a home office that does not matter much, but if you have to network some 25 clients and devices in an office building or department it is a pain in the ***.
A hub doesn't care whether a packet is AppleTalk, IP, NetWare or any other Ethernet based protocol. It just passes data around with out actually looking at the data (it doesn't decode the Ethernet packet). A switch won't care either. While it does examine the packet it only operates at the MAC address level. Again it doesn't matter what the packet is.
AppleTalk is only slower because it has a maximum packet size of 600 something bytes where as IP can use the full Ethernet packet size of 1500 bytes or so. This mean it takes 2.5 AppleTalk packets to transfer as much as one large IP packet. Because of this there is 2.5 times as much overhead (which accounts for 5-10% of an AppleTalk packet). AppleTalk uses the smaller packet size because of it's origins in LocalTalk. This is a much slower protocol so a large packet would have taken a impractical amount of time. LocalTalk implemented on Macs used the processor exclusively during a transfer so it would have meant the CPU was tied up for a longer time if a larger packet was used. This would have resulted in rather erratic operation for the user.
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