Why does this have to be an either or set-up? Why not add pathauto to the core and give it as an option for people to implement during installation? It is sloppy thinking to say you know better because you are a developer.
Liza, As someone who's a die-hard evangelist for pathauto, I'll be the first to say that it needs work before being unleashed on *every single Drupal site*. As others have noted, it gets unwieldy with large lists of nodes (say, 10,000) and it gets tremendously confused when your rules result in the same path for multiple pieces of content. There are other issues, too. They're certainly not insurmountable! But one of the things that keeps Drupal useful as a platform for developing web apps is the lean-and-mean highly-focused core. As others have noted, actual end-user installations will almost ALWAYS require additional contrib modules and tweaking. I think that incorporating the concept of pathauto into the core path.module is an awesome idea. Making sure it doesn't paint users into a corner is just as important, though. Does that make any sense? --Jeff