pagefile instead of swap

By default the ubuntu installer creates a swap partition and complains 
if you don't create one during manual partitioning.
But I think a swap partition is quite inflexible - imagine a user 
upgrades his PC so he wont need one any more - then he will
have to repartition his drive to get rid of the swap partition.

Wouldn't it make much more sense to create a page file, which one can 
move around resize and delete and recreate without having to touch the 
partition-table. I#m still unsure whether it has a performance impact 
though...

M2k