The advantage to keeping it separate is it allows South to release on it's own faster schedule. It gets features much quicker than the base framework.
I imagine it will get rolled in some day, when the feature set stabilizes a bit.
And yes, it is part of my workflow.
But for a new Django developer, it's not obvious, as it's not part of the documentation.
I recently brought up the documentation issue on the mailing list and received a pretty encouraging response from Mr. Kaplan-Moss himself:
http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thre...
Django 1.3 is a tightening of the bolts release so I am going through and updating where improvements are needed and patching where I feel capable. Perhaps you or others would like to improve the documentation as well?
IMHO the same should be done with contrib.admin
You could then have a django download with batteries and without.