On the Hero, Menu > People > 3rd tab on the bottom is groups.
If you then long press on the group you want you can send email, sms etc to the whole group.
The Hero does not do this poorly and you do not need a 3rd party app for it.
Also, login to google on your PC and go to
www.google.co.uk/contacts you can edit, create groups and contacts from there and they sync down to the phone.
I use this all the time in my business as I need to be able to send sms to my clients based on certain groups.