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I know, right? If cup and cone bearings become contaminated, it's easy to fix before it causes damage. Cartridge bearings on bikes are mostly just an artefact of capitalism.
Another reason people assume old school bearings are crap is the tiny likelihood of hubs not being set too tight from the factory, or being properly adjusted in the shop, before suffering premature failure.
'Here you go mate, what you need is these hubs with bearings you have to replace when anything goes wrong with them.'
Properly adjusting a cup and cone setup is one of life's great pleasures. I love when you find them somewhere super cool, like inside a Dura-Ace shifter.
Kimmo
gbj_tester
Tester is correct to point out that cup and cone bearings served all cyclists for millions of (mostly) trouble free miles for over a century.
I have a BW front hub which is reputed to have done over 200,000 miles - it still runs perfectly.
One small note of caution. On well used frames it is common for the slot in the seat tube which forms the seat pin clamp to become distorted. If a bike with this minor defect is ridden in the rain without mudguards water will get into the frame and cause major problems including rusty BB bearings.
It's quite common and irritating to read 'experts' suggestions that old style kit was defective, unlike the modern stuff which they imply never goes wrong. Naturally, if any machine is badly assembled by some incompetent person and then abused, it won't work very well. Old bikes, treated with reasonable care, would last at least the lifetime of the owner - that's what the trade doesn't like and it is possibly the origin of the stories about how bad they were.