I think it is both in a way. Personally I never used Classic or Kubrick for my blogs for two reasons.

1. It looked like you didn't care about your blog
2. I couldn't customise to have images for the header (or at least I didn't work out how)

The new TwentyTen theme is certainly a high quality theme, and even out of the box I would use it for a blog, just by changing the header images.

WordPress has come a long way from Kubrick and Classic, and as such a change in the default themes, and even retiring of them, I think, was inevitable.

As with JohnONolan I think the Hello Dolly plugin should be retired, and I just wonder if WP-Stats should be included by default, as that is the first plugin I add on a new blog, and I'm sure many others do as well.