Heh, after owning a "golden-era" Honda for the last few months I'm not really surprised that they stopped making them.
For one, it's nice to have torque. I don't have torque but I have a gearbox so I can manipulate that into a tolerable speed when merging into traffic. Trying to merge into traffic in 5th in most cases is like playing a game of "how big does the Dodge Ram in the mirror get?"
It's also loud. Not stripped-out race-car loud or listening to a jigsaw cutting through plate steel without hearing protection loud, but just loud enough that your passengers must shout to get their point across, and this is with the stock exhaust/muffler. As a 20-something I like the noise, but I can quickly imagine that the stockbroker with a wife and two children might not be so enthusiastic about paying the equivalent of $30,000 for this experience. They had to cut weight somewhere: I've got two airbags and no sound deadening.
But with that said, I do enjoy the driving experience. Every button and knob falls within reach of my ungodly shaped arms and the sightlines are great even though I'm 3/4 the size of every car on the road. My window seals are shot and my passengers hate the foreboding sense of death every time we go for a drive. And oh yes, the VTEC sounds amazing, though I don't think the neighbors like it!
The only car that comes close is the Acura ILX/Civic Si. I've long since argued that the ILX is a car in search of a question as the Civic Si is a leather package away from rendering it useless.
The problem with Acura is that Honda - the market, really - has gotten too good. In the '90s nobody thought it weird to buy a new Civic with drum brakes, no A/C, and without airbags, but today we all expect Lexus-like quality, leather-trimmed interiors covering twelve airbags, and MP3 connectivity to coddle our asses to the mall and back. With the Integra, we could at least argue that the bigger engine, standard A/C, optional leather interior, and larger dimensions made it a worthwhile step-up from the top-grade Civic.