As far as current, the mitigating factor is that the I2C bus when idle is at a high voltage level, so it is not a static 17mA current (it's probably not 17mA either, the pulldown devices will have some impedance also). The current only flows during periods of traffic. The worst case condition would be SDA line during transmitting a continuous stream of zeroes. I think it's probably fine for burst traffic. If I was driving some kind of display and sending large framebuffer data (potentially with a lot of zeroes), then I would probably use external.
On the next rev with LC support I'll probably change the examples to external pullup (since 44k is just about useless). I usually have it set as internal because that's how I test it (and I'm too lazy to remember to change it back).