You'd be wrong if you said that.
ini files are *cached* by Windows but *not* necessarily in active memory. They're likely to be paged out onto disk, in fact. The file access cache is still slower than active memory. Working with ini files is not easier, by any means. The only caveat of hash files is using them in write-mode.. of course, /writeini doesn't cache at all, so hash tables are still more efficient, just a bit more work to save them periodically (if you need to write out changes).
