Not many of these concerns apply in the UK. PAYG plans don't have monthly fees any more. Price per minute is high, but if you're only expecting to make a few minutes of calls per month, it's pretty much irrelevant (roughly comparable with using a payphone). The downside of PAYG is that a cheap handset will cost about 50 quid, instead of being free.

And we've had a single digital mobile phone standard for about 15 years, so there's no way you'd mistake an analog mobile for a GSM phone, because at first glance you'd think the analog phone was a typewriter, or a WWII-era field radio, or a double-decker bus, or something.