Man, I hate incremental and hlsearch :)

I'd agree with you on hidden but... the Vim defaults are (generally) the most vi-like settings, which makes some amount of sense. At the very least it keeps people from squabbling about what should be the default.

OTOH, the default vimrc has a bunch of stuff turned on and tweaked depending on your platform. So that could be a good venue for turning on some of these new, Vim-only features. That may sound like splitting hairs, but I think there's at least a bit of difference between "on by default" and "set to on in the config mkvimrc creates".