Sure, ideally, but realistically the vast majority of users are not going to ever run a node. There are millions of Bitcoiners, yet only ~50,000 node runners at best. And the privacy implications are not as detrimental to Monero users for using a public node as they are for Bitcoin since amounts and receivers are still not visible to malicious nodes. Monero syncing is relatively fast even when using a public remote node, so not sure why it's so much slower for Bitcoin SP.

Cake and Silentium are the only wallets that I know of right now that have Silent Payments

Silent Payments also allow you to post a public address and still prevent third parties from knowing what addresses payments/donations are going to. It's essentially the Bitcoin version of Monero Stealth Addresses.