HTC, LG and Motorola sell a lot of phones with keyboards. Some people love them. Personally, I don't, but it's got nothing to do with reliability. It's simply personal preference. You'll have to ask Apple and Google and Samsung their particular reasons for not having a physical keyboard.
The freezing and random reboots are indicative of a system problem. The easiest to fix is a failing sd card. Try replacing your MicroSD card and see if the problems ease up a bit. It could also be a poorly written app that, especially if your phone is rooted, interacts with the system in ways it shouldn't. If you think that this problem started after you installed a specific app or widget, then try uninstalling it. It could also be as simple as moving a widget or service to the SD card. These kind of apps should always be run from the phone's internal memory. Even running very low on memory might cause instability.
One other, but rare, possibility is dirty SD card, SIM or battery contacts. Shut down your phone and remove all three and clean the contacts with a little isopropyl alcohol on a cotton swab.
You could have corrupted a necessary system file or app. Static discharge ... battery dying in the middle of a read/write ... poorly applied system update, etc can all cause file corruption in any device. A factory reset would be the next course of action.
If you try all of the above and nothing seems to restore your phone to it's original stability, you may have failing hardware. A replacement phone might be in order.