Doesn't seem so to me. They just rarely put more than 3 USB ports and there doesn't seem to be any obvious correlation between the number and lack/presence of the SD port.

Are usb sticks typically faster and cheaper than SD cards or am I remembering this wrong?

You can get usb sticks that are faster than top end SD cards because you can just put an entire SSD, dram cache and controller included in a usb device, but the average usb stick and average SD card are equally poor