To everyone going on about this "back-door" installer bug:

Of note, all of these people are installing things from extras-dev, which means they probably have some mash-up of beta apps. (Am I the only one that read the warning on the wiki page for how to add the extras-devel repository?) It now looks like a common thread is a beta app named "appdownloader", which just announced a few days ago, and installs apps! So it appears that app may interact with the standard app manger, causing this odd side-effect.

As for an "official word", it's pretty apparent that the Maemo team has not intentionally coded such functionality in with Andre in the bug for it saying "I haven't seen any similar report or posting before. Better steps are welcome, or a confirmation by a second user." If they had coded such a back-door they would have certainly marked it "WontFix" by now.

Worst case, you don't like the thought of the app manager maybe having some rogue code to push/nuke apps, just un-install the app manager via apt-get. You can always install apps manually via apt-get or dpkg, (or that new app downloader that people are playing with now...) All that is open source, and you won't have to worry about anyone (Nokia, Maemo, Elvis, aliens, or the spirit of John Ritter) triggering a closed source back-door to install or uninstall apps on your device.

And while you're waiting for app manager to uninstall, you can make a little tin-foil hat for your N900 so you can match at parties in your underground bunker...