I wish it hadn't been, its easier to disable it then it is to have to plug in a monitor, keyboard and mouse just to enable it. From a security point of view its understandable but I prefer to interact through ssh so its bad in my case as a user.
A one time fix if you have no keyboard/mouse, take the SD card and connect to laptop. Under the /boot directory add a file named "ssh" with no data and no quotes. Then you can boot and get to the Raspberry Pi. But you must still do the prior comment and change the default password from raspberry to something else (otherwise you get a message asking you to do so).
