Why? Having insight into website traffic is hugely valuable to webmasters.
Requiring every website to create graphs and stats from log files is not practical, especially with websites that don't have a constant developer on it. Think blogs, recipe websites, restaurants. Google Analytics provides an insanely good value for them and it's a good thing.
It's not like pre Google Analytics we had a golden age of website stats.
It's not like your webmaster is load-balancing your cluster using Google Analytics feed. Let webmasters use tools for webmasters, and get rid of the marketing crap.
Essentially, it enables you as a small business to determine where you should be focusing what's probably a very limited budget in order to connect with audiences who are actually interested in your product/service. There's no exploitation or sale of data or misuse of private info involved.