Agreed, autoplay is fucking evil and I refuse to return to a site that has it enabled. As for the "its so obvious, why not done before", I'm also stumped, its seems so damn simple to do too...

The worst of it all, is that I remember reading various user's complaints in forums, discussions etc. You would think that Opera or IE would jump on this asap to get that head start advantage and maybe bring their usage numbers up a bit.