I understand your point about the speed of the system, but they have tried to address the situation that a very high percentage of users set up and forget the AV software.
One of the major problems with internet users is that they get some AV software and promptly think that they are protected 'for life' with what is installed, so the AV companies are starting to take users out of the loop with updates and scans. This hopefully will start to impact on the volume of virus that are still in the 'wild' after many months or years, when they should have been killed of in a few weeks.
I agree that there should be some way for 'advanced' users to configure the setup to their own requirements, but with free stuff you take what you get.
