I find myself doing things like this all the time:
Button button1 = (Button) findViewById(R.id.button1);
Button button2 = (Button) findViewById(R.id.
It should be noted, that
android:onclick="onClick"
requires at least Andoid SDK 1.6. So if you want your App to be accessible to as big audience as possible, you probably want to write your App against Android 1.6. Unless your App requires a feature which is only available in 1.6+. So while your first attempt is bit more of work, it has greater backwards compatibility. I usually do it the way you do, to keep my Apps 1.5 comptaible.
Edit: It's easy to overlook this, if you set up Android 2.2 as SDK in your projects settings, but set minSDK version to 3 (1.5), as it doesn't give compiler errors.