Barking at the wrong tree

Keir, Opera is not even in the main repositories. It's included in a new and special repository called "dapper-commercial" in a Canonical server and not Ubuntu's. We also have multiverse, which includes a bunch of non-free but nonetheless, useful software to complete the end-user's experience. I'm sure you know what this repository contains (Sun Java, Adobe Acrobat Reader, etc.). It's possible that some applications in multiverse will move to dapper-commercial to differentiate the commercial and non-commercial apps as well as non-free. I personally use a few of those apps in another laptop.

It's not even turned on by default unless explicitly allowed so from Gnome-App-Install (aka Add/Remove Applications) as well as dapper-updates and the binary is pulled from a completely different server. Also, a default install of Ubuntu does not contain any of these applications mentioned and it all boils down to choice of the end-user. People who use Ubuntu have the freedom to choose what software to install in their system to make their experience much better and we must not in any way curtail that single most important form of freedom.