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Never knew anything about this, everyone only mentions the US.
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They're virtually all Council of Europe members, where we at least share some legal background (yes, even places like Ukraine) via the European Court of Human Rights, which is the ultimate court of appeal whether you're tried over here or over there, and provides guarantees of a fair trial in your own language and other safeguards. New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and the USA would be the exceptions, and three of them are Commonwealth. There isn't a language problem of course (unless you're extradited to Texas :P).
The European countries were already governed by similar treaties with us and there's a general EU-US treaty as well - notably it doesn't abolish the evidence requirement, even for US-friendly states like Italy or Denmark and those who've suffered terrorism like Spain.
EU countries also now have the European Arrest Warrant, which is what was used in the case of Hussein Osman - given the freedom of movement and labour in the EU this is fine by me, as you've got to allow the police similar freedom of movement. Doesn't apply to the US though.
The US-UK Treaty was actually brought in under the legislation for the EU Arrest Warrant, another example of slipping something into legislation about something else - another of the multitude of examples of this trick being pulled.
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If we tilted the extradition in favour of the Americans, you can bet we got something just as good in return
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No we didn't, the US hasn't actually ratified their end of it. Were we, for instance, to say 'we believe this Irish chap planted a load of bombs in Northern Ireland then legged it to the USA' they wouldn't just hand him over - we'd have to provide reasonable proof of guilt. In the reverse case, we wouldn't be able to stop it once they'd proved they'd got the right man. It's not remotely balanced or fair - people in the US wanted for crimes here get more legal protection than people here wanted in the US. I'm not sure that's defensible - the Home Office people I've heard try blatantly lied.
The official line is that the US can't extradite its citizens willy nilly because they have a Constitution that prevents them doing this without good evidence. We don't have a Constitution, so rather than take a leaf out of their book, it's best for us that we can quite happily be trampled on.
The judges (actually it's usually one judge, by a quirk of fate, who gets to hear nearly all the extradition cases, a chap called Timothy Workman) can only rule on the basis of what the law is - the fact that the Treaty was brought in by Royal Prerogative (i.e. without the benefit of Parliament) is, unfortunately irrelevant (except that they can't pull that trick any more - it's got to go through Parliament now). If judges start making law you get a constitutional crisis just as much as if politicians start undermining judges (which brings us back to Blunkett again).
Anyway, here's a fairly sober assessment:
http://www.statewatch.org/news/2003/jul/25ukus.htm