Comcast does this as well - if you are leasing the Comcast modem then you are putting out a pair of APs. One of them is a public Comcast hotspot. I think you can request that it be turned off however.
Right now I have a Cisco DPC3008, which I can't really complain about. I have a Buffalo Airstation Extreme 1900, which has been good so far apart from its minute-long reboot times. I thought I was getting a DD-WRT router though, didn't realize the standard version did not have a supported DD-WRT build.
I have to admit though - when a contractor ripped out the sidewalks and took out my cable, I was glad that my neighbors were running the hotspot. Took almost 3 weeks to get back online.
In Germany, Kabel Deutschland can and does regularly update your cable modem remotely. There's a even a list of "censored websites" pushed down to your own router. They provide a Fritzbox but it's slightly more locked down (feature-wise) than normal so you can't even use it to a full potential.
I bought an Airport and stuck it behind it to at least isolate our home network from this backdoored mess. Good to know that Ubiquity provide a reasonable replacement.
As for Ubiquiti being consumer grade, it is like an Intel Xeon E3. It is the same chip that is used in consumer stuff with enhancements for reliability. For instance, Ubiquiti equipment supports grounding via STP Ethernet. It generally supports some variant of PoE and is meant to be mounted on walls and ceilings. There are even outdoor models. It also does not require a reboot on every change. In addition, there is a team of engineers working on making the firmware better and their customers are able to report problems to them. Then there are firmware features like VLANs, policy based routing, BGP, ping watch dogs and other things not found in stock firmware of consumer grade equipment.