"If you want the non-Google contacts that are already on your Android phone to be migrated to Google contacts, there is no way to do this directly on the phone"

With current Android versions up to 2.3.5, 3.something and 4.0 there bloody well ought to be a way! Also, there should be a function to synchronize contacts IN CONTACTS.

But we're still stuck with one way sync from Google to phone and having to wander around the desert elsewhere to do that broken one-way sync.

Just copy how Palm did it a decade ago, that actually works!