The car I learned to drive on was my dad's Superstar '74 Beetle, so I do kinda know about manual-shifting with feel because it too didn't have a tach (but then one time, I drove it at around 140kmph for an extended period of time on an expressway, and one of the pistons gouged through the cylinder cover and the engine ceased on the expressway - was a ****-show for me, and my dad never let me touch his Beetle again after he got a new 1.8 flat-4 for it). Plus the fact that in my university years, I kind of riced around in an EG6, which was manual. I guess that that was probably the time that I actually developed a habit of shifting according to speed. The 1.5 D15Y Vtec-E engine in my Civic was matched with a final gear ratio that was so tall and evenly spaced that I drove around with 20kmph intervals per gear for daily-driving. It was super economical to drive that way as well, so I had to stick with that driving habit for the whole time I was a student (because I was broke like, basically, the whole time). At 100 kmph in 5th, the rev was only at 2000rpm - crazy low. However, once I started working, I daily'd in an automatic-transmission Toyota Hilux since then for a majority of my "driving life" up until now. So yes, I may have forgotten the feeling of it a little bit because I haven't driven a manual-transmission vehicle in quite a while.
Anyhow, my 318i has the Steptronic-auto (I'd love to swap it to manual, but that's a whole other story altogether), but I drive around in manual-mode all the time because automatic is just too boring. In Thailand, non-M e46's with manuals are more rare than M3's, so it's just not in my ability to find one (in fact I've only ever seen one non-M e46 with a stick-shift here, and I believe that the owner did a swap to get it to become a manual because the shifter, shift-boot, etc. didn't match with the rest of the car both in color and "age/wear".) Personally, I find that with the "+/-" of the Steptronic (and other manumatics), I get lost in the gears when shifting - like I'd forget which gear I'm in. However, with an H-pattern shifter, I never had this problem; although the gear display is always illuminated by default so I can look down to see which gear I'm in, I still want the speedo and tach to be always illuminated as well (just out of habit of shifting with the speedo, which I still do apparently). For me, I use the speedo to shift for daily-driving (eco-driving) and the tach to shift for spirited-driving.