I like target-less build files as an easy entry for newbies as well as a stripped down process for very simple things (Ant's own docs.xml could perfectly be stated without targets at all).
If there were no tasks or task-lookalikes as children of <project>, I'd say this was a bad idea. But there are, and there will be until at least Ant 2 (which looks to be getting farther and farther away). Given that, there is no reason from the user's perspective not to allow all tasks as children of <project>, so making that change makes ant easier for the user to write build files for.
Once you accept that <project> should have a default <target> (which has no dependencies and gets automatically executed before anything from the dependency graph) in the same way that <fileset> has a default <patternset>, it seems as nonsensical to me to require a <target> in addition to the default one as it would be to require a <patternset> in <fileset> in addition to the default one.
Arguments about putting tasks at the end of the build file apply equally to the elements that are already there, and we seem to be coping just fine.
All of which is a verbose way of saying +1 to target-less build files.
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