This is exactly the case. Someone noticed it somehow (source / activities dump, I forget) and figured out how to launch it. And last I saw it wasn't actually removed, it just had stronger permissions on what was allowed to launch it, which broke all existing launchers. There may or may not be a new way to launch it.

Meanwhile, the source code keeps moving more and more towards having a real runtime-permissions-manager. Honestly I think they'll have something soon, but probably not before 4.5 or 5.0. In the meantime, I've been loving XPrivacy, it's probably more granular than anything they would release anyway (and I've had exceedingly few crashes, blocked data is faked not broken).