Is there any good reason why both grub and lilo is being merged by emerge system. I think we should just have grub there.
Yes, some people need lilo for whatever reason. I think we should keep it. (there are always going to be questionable packages like less, iptables, etc. It all depends on the person and default-1.0_rc6 is supposed to be a *reasonable* (not perfect, which is impossible) default that will be pleasing to a majority of people). We have system profiles if people want to create a "lean-1.0_rc6" profile, which is fine.
less and iptables is not the same because grub and lilo does the same thing, having both of them in the default system doesn't make sense. It's no problems for those that want lilo to just merge it after they have merged system. Just like we do with syslogger, xfsprogs and lvm-user.
Also, removing lilo causes it to be reinstalled when you do emerge system which is very annoying.