I beg to differ on the first point. There are registrars with cheaper FIXED prices...no coupons needed. The majority of my domain names are registered with Godaddy, mainly for resell purposes...most buyers seem to trust/be familiar with/prefer Godaddy. Most of the domain names that I plan to hold on to for a long time to come, develop or have already developed are NOT registered with Godaddy. I have not found much that Godaddy provides that others do not...in fact, maybe less (in the way of service).
It looks that many newbies use name.com for their cheap prices. The registry charges registrars about $6.5 per .com domain, so any company selling them cheaper is just taking a loss and hoping to make it back by attracting clients and selling them other services.. Anyway this is how registerfly collapsed after selling .info domains for $0.60 2 years ago, so name.com is risky. I know I'd rather pay a couple extra bucks per domain than putting my names at risk
I purchase all of my new domains from GoDaddy. I always use a coupon, so the registration fees are competitive with other discount registrars. In addition to the name registration, I switched to their hosting and have not had any problems to date. The control panel is a bit awkward at times, but other than that no problems.