What is the easiest way to create a planar grid of vertices? This must be very easy, but can't find it anywhere. I am trying to create a planar grid of vertices to specification (i.e. I want to say the size of the plane and how many vertices in X direction and how many in Y or Z direction). It would also be okay to start with a quad face.

I found very clunky ways of doing it, including subdividing faces or edges followed by grid fill, but they are very inconvenient in the sense that you can only do easily grids that have a power of two number of vertices. I want to be able to specify non-power of two dimensions (i.e. 1440 x 500), which is extremely tedious to achieve by subdivision.

Is there an easier way to achieve this without having to create the geometry by hand? Ideally I would like to avoid scripting.
Ok, as I expected, it is actually trivial. In blender >= 2.77:

Add > Grid

You can then specify the number of subdivisions and the radius of the grid as options.