Avoiding surrogate keys

I have a mailing list table, and 2 of the columns contain values which have to be from a list.  These are country and status.  There are 237 possible countries and 3 possible statuses.  Now I know some people would assign a sequence ID (surrogate key) to the country and status values, and have them looked up in separate tables to get the textual value, but I think I'll still have those tables, just without an ID column, so 1 column for both the countries and statuses tables.  This means storing the proper value in the main table.

So instead of

name, email, country, status

'mr smith', 'emailaddress@example.com', 44, 2

'mrs jones', 'me@emailcompany.com', 21, 1

I'd have

name, email, country, status

The values of course would be constrained by foreign key lookup to their associated tables.

Are there any serious downsides to this?  If so, what would you recommend?

Thanks

Thom