Active Web Analysis: Convenience for web masters, growing nuisance for website users?

Of late I see a trend in various websites to use site external web analysis products like google analytics or Site catalyst (to name a few) to track web site usage patterns, generate reports etc. All these products mostly work with page instrumentation e.g script injection or similar.

It makes me ponder, what makes web masters adopt external web analysis software compared to passive log analyzers like awstats, webalizer or similar ? Nice looking reports and charts ? Ease of configuration ?

Of what I understood about these products, 2 things concern me

• Active intrusion to site user experience in my opinion. Each page navigation generally would cause logging requests to these external sites, which at times can cause page delays. With more and more ad view/serve business models on web sites, it is already becoming painful to get faster and non obstrusively to useful content.
• Web 2.0 changes the concept of page views. In web 2.0 paradigm , we are looking mostly web app model, where page views are replaced by dynamic UI/DOM injections and AJAX data fetching etc. So the question, is in such web 2.0 scenarios, how affective is results and reports from such products?
  

BTW Piwik is an open source project which aims to create open alternative to commerical products like Google Analytics etc with open architecture and API's to extend it to your needs. Most importantly you keep your site usage statistics and data, your own. Maybe that will get some brownie points from privacy advocates.