Many shopping sites use this technique legitimately so repeat visitors can go straight to the department they are interested in rather than go through the home page or by clicking links in a menu.
Also available is a Program Monitor widget for your homescreen that shows the number of active applications at any given time and links you into the same Task Manager menu.
In spite of its small iterative steps forward, Sense is now a user interface that's beginning to show its age, with oversized widgets that fail to make the best of the space available to them and that egregious omnipresent menu bar at the bottom that takes up far more space than a couple of links to your apps and phone ought to.