another drawback

All recent browsers support the cert extension »Certificate Subject Alt Names«, with DNS names
as entries, and thus allow to use name-based virtual https hosts. We use them on several of
our sites and have had no complaints at all until now. As an example you can look at the cert
of https://lists.dante.de/, our site for the mailing lists of the German TeX Users Group.

Of course, if one still needs to support IE4 or such, one is out of luck.

That said, this is no solution for mass hosters, as one needs to recreate the certificate for
every virtual host that's added. In the end, that is not manageable, especially from a
security viewpoint. But for a company or an organization which has a few dozen hosts and a low
change rate, it's a working solution.