Merkle root Vs transaction hashes It is not clear to me, why not we can simply store transaction hashes in a block header instead of storing the Merkle root. I understand that storing transactions' hashes will slightly increase size of a block header. However, the transaction verification process will be greatly simplified as one does not have to compute Merkle tree. In that case, one can verify a transaction by simply searching that transaction hash in the header.

Noman Aslam
Storing the hash of every transaction in the block header could make the block header much larger than it currently is. Right now the whole header is 80 bytes, and the tx merkle root is 32 bytes of that. You can hash any number of transactions into a 32 byte merkle root, so it works very well as a cryptographically secure compression technique. 

I can think of a few effects of larger block headers:


SPV wallets would be more resource intensive to run, they would require much more storage and bandwidth. I think computing the merkle branch is probably rarely the hardware bottleneck to be considered when designing wallets. 
Miners would be incentivized to mine small blocks. This is because a larger blockheader would mean a larger input value for the SHA-256 hash function, so it would take longer to compute the hash. This is important: the fastest block hash a miner could compute would be one with no transactions in it (other than the coinbase).
You would be able to fit less transactions in a block, since more of the blockspace would be used by the header. A good implementation would not change the number of transactions you could fit in a block, see Pieter's comments below.


There are probably more, feel free to expand on this list.