I still think it's a terrible default, though. I'm coming to OSX from BSD and using it as a Unix. Retrofitting case-insensitivity onto a Unix is bound to lead to ugly corner cases.
It generally works well, but the other way around does not work: many OSX software (most prominently — as usual — adobe's) play fast and lose with casing, and will break down on case-sensitive HFS+.
On top of which, it would have been an added complication for developers porting from Classic, and an unexpected change for users, in exchange for no substantive benefit.
In truth, the only time HFS+'s case-insensitivity has bitten me was extracting an SDK from Broadcom, and even then, the SDK wasn't about to run on OS X anyway (it's entirely Linux-based), I was just pulling out some documentation.
Indeed, I've had to make password systems case-insensitive for similar reasons.