Personally I like gold as an object. It's old school. It's one of the side effects of a game that tries to let you interact with all the objects. You can bake bread, pick up worthless things like candlesticks or mugs or pumpkins, and you can handle your money.
I hate the walking around with a billion gold in a counter thing that happens in most games these days. Partly because no one would ever have that much money (in pseudo-medieval Europe anyway) and partly because you don't have it in your inventory. To abstract. Stacks of money are fun. Counters, not so much.
