Comment 11 for bug 203217

It is sensible to have the applet on the panel by default as one of Ubuntu's goal is to provide a very good out-of-the-box experience for the average user. Those admins who deploy a large site can disable it with gconf as it doesn't make sense in this case.

Anyway this is a bug that MUST be fixed.

In my opinion it would be a good idea if the applet would automatically remove itself if there is only one local user or if there are very much users (perhaps more than 100), but this is another topic that should not be discussed here.