With you 100%. Except for when I had to read documentation for the UPS API, which requires Reader (by design). Terrible. This isn’t a PDF, it’s an abomination. http://yfrog.com/4ewijp
Google Chrome has a built in (ok, a plug-in, but I think it's there by default) pdf viewer. Works pretty well for me.
I actually view Chrome's PDF plugin as a complete abomination (at least on the Mac), and go out of my way to nuke it. It's slow, and there is _no_ easy way to open the PDF displayed in a PDF handling app (i.e. Preview) without resorting to copy and pasting the URL into wget.
Cmd + S or using Safari
You can open PDFs displayed in Safari in Preview without saving them to the disk. (There is also a button that puts the document in the Downloads folder.) Chrome’s PDF viewer is better than Adobe’s plugin but worse than Safari’s PDF viewer.