@stewart midwinter
iLife 08 buried everything in a folder too since before that it was commonplace on Mac 'help' boards to find someone had gone in and played around with the photo structure and mucked up their iPhoto library entirely. When Apple put in the media browser to allow people to select photos more easily to attach to emails etc, then the file structure wasn't needed quite so much.
People who know what they're doing and do still want to see it can right click on the iPhoto Library icon, choose 'Show Package Contents' and get taken straight into the file structure - no messing in the Terminal required.