Good post, GK
My dad recently bought a new belkin router. When I installed it for him I noticed it has a card slot on the bottom with a paper card installed. That card has the serial number on it and a factory assigned unique password which has been set on the router. The user can change too, but at least it is not the commonly know default password printed in all the manuals and posted all over the Internet.
A friend of mine recently told me of some funny business going on with him Internet at his house. All of a sudden it didn't work anymore. I went over to have a look and found that one of his neighbors had gotten into his wireless router and had made a bunch of changes. The person was trying to get my friend attention by gumming up the works, but didn't lock him out of his router. So I was able to set him up with a proper password so others could not simple taken over his network.
Companies are so afraid of putting users off so they make stuff have no default password because users are too lazy or interested in understanding. It's a hard problem when there is a lot of competition. It's more of a user problem, IMO, because they are the buying public and companies don't want to offer or make it hard for them.
I'm not sure my dad would have been able to deal with the belkin router on his own,