I also don't care for the miniature size of the XT. That's exactly why I bought an old DRebel even though the XT was out. It fits much better in my hands.
The 1.6x crop factor doesn't bother me so much, but what do I do with these images that aren't 3x5 or 4x6 image ratio? When I print them out, aren't they going to get cropped by the photo lab (likely in a way that I wouldn't prefer).