"don't want to deal with them"?
In all programs, yes sometimes you don't want to deal with them when you can use a language feature to simplify things. Dealing with new/deletes, etc is both a tedious task and can be very error prone as one can see by the number of C++ programs that have memory leak issues. Now this isn't to say that there aren't cases where you have to do it because of critical performance reasons.
it's perfectly fine to optimize development time, but this trend of offloading excess work onto users platform is unacceptable.
It's unacceptable to use a built-in language feature, such as auto_ptr, to help to reduce the amount of memory leaks? Huh?
The rest of your post has no relevance at all to what I was talking about. I wasn't proclaiming that one shouldn't ever manage their memory manually or that you shouldn't care about performance or the quality of your code because hardware will get faster to make up for it. You seem to be ranting at someone else or else your turning my post into some sort of strawman.