One thing people forget is long distance fees. Cell phones basically did away with long distance fees, and we're better for that. However, landlines have some notable benefits:

• self-powered, you could call in a power outage
• high fidelity, yeah it was bandpass filtered, but everything in that filter made it through
• freedom of usage, it was hard-fought but you could plug anything into your phone line, from more phones to answering machines to computer modems. There was a whole market around "dumb shit you plugged into your phone line" products

We're still way better overall with cell phones, but something was lost to get them.