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Jack comments on The Majority Is Always Wrong - Less Wrong
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A friend of mine claims Fahrenheit is more convenient because of "-ties". "Today it will be in the fifties/sixties/thirties/high seventies." Celsius doesn't have conveniently-spoken ranges that give users a general idea of the weather. I countered with high and low teens, low twenties, but I don't think his point is completely invalid.
You say centimeters are better for small things and meters better for large things, but neither are very useful for things that might constitute an arm-load. I'm not sure that sentence is very clear, so I'll try examples. My laptop is 36 centimeters wide, which is an inconveniently large number of units for it to be, but it's only a little more than a foot. This textbook: about a foot square. That hard-drive is half a foot (I'll admit that "six inches" was easier to the tongue, but in reality it's closer to seven, which I wouldn't say). What I'm trying to say is that the unit "foot" is very convenient for things that we might be handling in everyday situations, unless those things are hand-sized.
I have similar intuitions but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't if I had been raised on the metric system.
The obvious answer is to figure out what people raised with the metric system are thinking.
I was raised with the metric system and I have to agree with your sentiment. Metric lacks convenient human-sized units. Decimeters are maybe acceptable for lengths, but few people use them. I myself often use feet and inches to describe human-sized objects just because they are more convenient. But as soon as I have to do any kind of work with a quantity beyond pure description, I will swap to metric.
I was raised with the metric system, but I think inches and feet would be better than centimetres (too small) and metres (too large) for lots of everyday situations (plus, they have intuitive anthropocentric approximations, namely the breadth of a thumb and the length of a shoe). The litre is similarly too large IMO. I have no strong opinion about kilos vs pounds. On the other hand, I prefer Celsius to Fahrenheit -- having the melting point of ice at such a memorable value is useful. (But I also like Fahrenheit's 100 meaning something close to human body temperature. I might like a hypothetical scale with freezing at 0 and human body temperature at 100 even more.)
I was raised on the English system and I have essentially the same intuitions about feet and inches vs. cm and meters and about Celsius vs. Fahrenheit, so there may be something to them.
My understanding (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that British and Canadians are essentially raised on both systems, so perhaps they could comment on which is more naturally intuitive.