i'd say predictive text/t9 was way faster than any other phone input method ever for texting. nothing else comes close imo, not even blackberry keyboards (unless you need more fine control over capitalisation and punctuation and stuff e.g work emails)
I've used them all and THE fastest and most accurate entry on mobile by far was the psuedo-t9 keyboard on the Blackberry 7130. It was so good that it was frustrating to use the full keyboard on later Blackberry models.
I wonder how many people actually experienced this keyboard in the world, perhaps only in the thousands?*