Wise and benevolent? I wouldn't encourage this behaviour from any company. It's risky and has a high chance of completely alienating your users if you don't get it exactly right, and and something breaks.
My first experiences with MP3s on Linux was with RedHat 9 and Fedora Core 4 - Fedora 9. Yes, it was always possible to install the restricted codecs, but only recently were those instructions and processes made easier (and now, with recent distros, automatic). Maybe I was doing it wrong, but asking a user to install "restricted codecs" for something that Windows Media Player can do automatically isn't good for making users feel comfortable with your system.
RedHat isn't interested in making a desktop OS, though. Their focus is on the enterprise market, with the Fedora team doing their best to make a desktop OS. It would be very difficult for RedHat or Novell to really make a push into the mainstream desktop market, and I imagine that justifying to their shareholders would be impossible.
The desktop distro teams can't organize enough to get support from major companies, and the enterprise companies can't push into desktop because it's financial suicide to try and support normal desktop users who can barely use Windows.
AFAIK, Canonical tries to bundle Ubuntu with only free (read: open-source) software, to promote the idea that a totally open-source system can be a viable alternative to Windows / Mac. We all know that's a load of bollocks, though, as inertia keeps us using Flash Player and MP3 instead of HTML5 and OGG, for instance.
Boxee, Google TV, and such are able to license Netflix and use their technology because it's much harder to hack them. Netflix has been fighting movie companies for years now to get full Linux support because Silverlight is the only player technology with the DRM to satisfy the studios that movies can't be copied from the stream, and Microsoft obviously has no intention of making it available on mainstream Linux distributions.
I believe that Boxee, Google TV, and 360/PS3 all use other technologies, but that can be inherently less secure because it's harder to get inside of them. Also, they can afford to pay the monstrous fees to work with Netflix and develop a solution that will satisfy all of Netflix's backers.
Licensing technology, especially with all of the patent stuff that's been going on lately, is an incredible undertaking and costs a lot of money, and many companies are unwilling to license to companies like Canonical because Linux is a huge administrative headache due to its openness and peoples' desire to have open systems.
At least, that's how I understand all of this. I could be wrong.
The unfortunate thing with this design is that it's quite often possible to break things by updating silently, too. My Cr-48 became almost unusably slow after the most recent update, and I seem to remember a bunch of Windows Phone 7 devices getting bricked in the same manner.
You have to have extraordinary quality control and testing on silent updates like that, and quite frankly, if OSes with a very limited number of variations on hardware can't get it right, how can we expect PC distributions to?
A lot of it comes from hardware manufacturers and other providers. MP3 support on Linux was terrible for a long time because of all the patent mess.
Talk to companies like Broadcom or AMD / NVIDIA about making their components work much better with Linux, first. A lot of the issue is on their end, with not providing interfaces and drivers for distros to include.
Canonical, Novell, and everyone else try their best to include what they can for their distros but it's hard when the companies making these computers don't help much.
I generally use HTTP Digest Authentication for personal projects - since I don't really require fancy login boxes, and it's really trivial to implement.
Actually, I have seen that - one of our websites got infected with a particular hack that did this to our Google cache and search results.
They redirect search engines to the fake pharmacy pages, while still leaving regular users able to see the normal content. This has been happening a lot, especially on self-hosted Wordpress blogs, it seems.