For emailing photos you can do the post processing trick where you have Lightroom open the pictures in your email client after exporting, and leave copies the photos someplace on your hard drive that you have to then delete later because that method requires exporting the files as the first step.
There is a dude (Andréas Saudemont) who made a really cool plug-in so you can email directly from Lightroom skipping the need to actually export the image to a file someplace on your hard drive as an intermediate step.
I have to ask, with all due respect (I love lightroom, it's the only photo management app for me, I couldn't love it more, I know Adobe is a great company, no insult here), what were you guys there at Adobe thinking? How about being able to drag a modified image out of Lightroom and drop it in your mail app (or website creation app) and you actually get the modified version???!!!! Either that or a way to simply email the modified version as Andréas Saudemont's plug-in does smoothly, with no file clutter afterwards? Drag and drop makes the most sense to me. Why does dragging and dropping an image from Lightroom give me the original unmodified version? That seems like it would be the second most popular choice. Maybe you could add a way to pick on a case by case basis, like when you drag and drop an image somewhere a pop-up window asks "do you want the original or modified version?".
This really is a huge hole in Lightroom. I'd recommend Lightroom to people who are less technical and want to use Lightroom's basic features and then be able to email their photos. This just seems like a total no brainer. Make Lightroom so it can compete head to head with programs like Picasa and iPhoto in the ease of use category. It's already every easy to use and intuitive. Sure, the price is high, but it's relative. Make Lightroom more attractive and the price is less of an issue. If more people want to give you their money that's a good thing. Make them want to do that.
If the Adobe code guys aren't reading this forum how about anyone from sales?
With all respect, I love Lightroom and respect Adobe greatly, but you dropped the ball on this one.