What did you pay for your G25 btw? Lowest I've seen them new is $240 on eBay.
Got mine for £139 from Amazon (new, factory sealed, etc... I hate buying stuff second hand... bad experiences) which at the current exchange rate is around the $210 mark. The cheapest it had been was £129 five days previously... the price was all over the place - £129 one day, £160 the next, £145 the day after that... £139 for two days, then the price rocketed the day after I bought it as it hit £200...
And yes, I agree about the 'turn it into a two direction shift' is not really a 'feature'... aside from the fact that it allows racing games that don't properly support the 7-position shifter (6 forward, one reverse) to work.
But you can also get it to treat the 7 positions as 'buttons' so while the clutch doesn't work for them, it means that you can shift to first, second, sixth, reverse, whatever with the correct location on the gearbox.