It's amazing(ly stupid) how people get upset about this, but don't seem to care when Google chooses to install an auto-updater for Chrome without permission, or Sun puts in an auto-updater for Java, again without asking, or Adobe does the same thing for Acrobat... the list goes on and on.
I'm more annoyed by Mozilla's presumption to inform me of my "rights", while setting Firefox to automatically check and install updates for their browser than I am about MS sticking a .NET plugin in Firefox.