I still consider it an attack.
There's lots of security reasons why a company would want to do that, both in protecting from malware and protecting from loss of company IP. Still, a huge trade off between privacy and security, and I am not willing to make that trade.
Maybe I would do it on my own connection, where I was both the MITM'er and the "victim", but the whole ssl system is built upon trust. It's a shaky foundation (do you trust all of the root certs in your browser?), but let's not start poking holes everywhere in it.
I'd be interested to know the manufacturer of these devices and how prevalent they are. (p.s. you're welcome to email me rather than do that in public: append @google.com to my username.)
Cheers
Until I saw that I thought of it as 'an attack'.