It's a real pain, but they want the less sophisticated users to be able to take advantage of all the latest stuff and if Chrome or IE is shipping with it enabled, they have to compete. Well, that explains WebRTC at least. As for the other stuff...

I'm a Pocket user, but I have no idea why that needed to be integrated into the browser, seems like an insane decision to me. I hope they got a good pay day out of that.

Same as the history based advertising tiles. Sure, it's checked locally, it still seems creepy and annoying... but again, browser.newtabpage.enhanced = false.

Unless we lose this level of user choice, I don't see a better alternative. It would be nice if someone would ship some tool to automatically update a user.js file, however, I think many of us have different opinions about what feature we do and do not want enabled in our browsers.