Does anyone know any sane reason for such bundling decision? Google engineers act wisely in most cases, so this kinda surprized me.

This would cause collisions with other versions of servlet API pulled via Maven dependencies:

• webapp classpath will likely contain version which is bundled with GWT;
• container may refuse to load the GWT jar as it contains the javax.servlet package;
• in most cases this will likely deviate classpaths across your IDE's debugger and the really executing VM.

Link to the jar in question (just so you see the same thing after unzipping as I do): http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/google/gwt/gwt-user/1.7.0/gwt-user-1.7.0.jar