I have a BB perl and have transfered my contacts from SIM to my address book to sync with outlook contacts. This works great. However I don't see a way to transfer my contacts from BB memory back to the SIM. I wanted to be able to do this incase I get a different phone device in the future and want to bring all my newly created contacts from my current BB perl to a new non-BB phone device. I know the contacts are stored in outlook and I can store to a pst file for backup. But just incase I were to get a new phone device that was not outlook compatible or didn't have any type of PC sync software. In the past I have been able to transfer my contacts from phone to phone via the SIM chip.
Your SIM card will only hold a name and a phone number under each contact--no address, email, additional phones, etc. So that is not a good plan of "escape" should you choose to change phones.
BB Desktop Manager will also allow you to output your BB data to a txt/csv file which is somewhat more universal.