The even better news is that there are (at least) two GUI tools for re-enabling it: The good news is that Apple did not remove the FTP server ( /usr/libexec/ftpd) from Lion, they only removed the GUI to enable or disable it.
I'm also willing to admit that there may not be much practical difference in most cases - that is, I don't know that SFTP is much slower than FTP, but when you're talking about '8 GB at a time' transfers, every little bit matters.
Personally, I prefer FTP on my LAN because, since it is unencrypted, there's no extra processing time needed to encrypt and decrypt the transfer. Others have mentioned that they have some devices which only support FTP so SFTP isn't an option. I do this all the time when transferring DVD rips from one machine to another. For instance, transferring large files over your own LAN. However, there are some cases when using FTP is perfectly fine. No one should be using FTP over the Internet. Generally speaking, that's not a bad move, because most times SFTP is available anywhere FTP is, and SFTP is far superior in terms of security. Apple decided to remove the GUI for enabling and disabling FTP from Mac OS X Lion.
