Letters to the Editor
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Well...
It can be debated whether or not Buddhists are more 'trained' in observing mental phenomena. That is, I can believe that they are trained in attuning themselves to a particular mental state and observing some types of mental phenomena, but I would be hesitant to say that this can speak for the mental phenomena of people in general, reliant as Buddhism is on some type of orthodoxy and pre-conceived belief system. Why assume that Buddhists are the only ones capable of introspection? Have you read Dostoyevsky, for example? There are insights about specific mental processes in Notes from Underground that it would take scientists millenia to reach. But the reason neither of these are helpful in scientific research is that we haven't found a way to quantify, isolate, and study them, at least not yet.
As for the argument for doing away with physicalism, you bring up many of the same issues that have been raised in the endless physicalism vs. dualism debate in the field of the philosophy of mind. But there are just as extensive arguments and counterarguments ad infinitum. This is not the place to go into it too deeply, but for example, the fact that brain states and phenomenal states "appear different" could just be a characteristic of our perception, not the states themselves. Also, as proposed by Daniel Dennett (and also kind of by Quine and U.T. Place), 'phenomenal states' themselves could be a misconception. That is, you're talking about it as if when someone sees a green traffic light, there is actually something 'green' occuring within their mind, whether physical or disembodied. But all of the things we call phenomenal states could just be different permutations of one big mental state - call it 'consciousness' - that is created by our neural processes. And anyway, your claim that dreams and thoughts cannot be detected is not entirely correct. Neural imaging is constantly becoming more and more refined (see the recent findings on the neural states of religious people 'speaking in tongues'), and different sorts of dreams produce different sorts of images. I think it's entirely feasible that it could reach a micro-level of refinement where we could actually pinpoint distinct neural images for distinct 'mental states'.