Drupal 7 EntityFieldQuery()

So I finally got around to looking into module development with Drupal 7. In fact, I really started to get my hands on Drupal 7 for the first time. I was very pleasantly surprised with the admin overlay and the entire usability of Drupal 7.

While building a module with Features, Views, and Fields (most of CCK was rolled up into Drupal 7 core with some changes and is now called Fields), I quickly ran into a problem. I wanted to do a simple query of node data. In Drupal 6 I would have accomplished this with a simple select statement. Something like:

//Note: this is an untested example but should be pretty close
$sql = "SELECT ct.field_myfield_value FROM {node} n
  INNER JOIN {content_type_mytype} ct ON n.nid = ct.nid
  WHERE status = %d AND field_myfield2_value = %d";
$results = db_query($sql, 1, 12);

While in Drupal 7 I did this to accomplish the same thing.

$query = new EntityFieldQuery();
$entities = $query->entityCondition('entity_type', 'node')
->entityCondition('bundle', 'mytype')
->propertyCondition('status', 1)
->fieldCondition('field_myfield2', 'value', '12', '=')
->execute();
 
$nodes = entity_load('node', array_keys($entities['node']));

This returns a collection of loaded nodes with all necessary node values. On first glance this seems to be much less efficient and a very roundabout way of getting to the single value I needed. However, Drupal 7 Entities really changed the database structure of how field data is stored, making something like this necessary.

Perhaps someone out there can shed some additional light, or point me to a discussion on how this is better. I like the fact that there is an API type interface for making these queries, but I never minded writing SQL and I am a little concerned on the scalability of this with very large websites.

I don't doubt that it has numerous benefits, but I just recently made the transition from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 (not all the way yet, but I am getting there), and am anxious to learn more.