It seems like since 8.04 they've changed the package naming conventions for LaTeX twice. That's been the biggest pain about upgrading for me, everything else has been a breeze.
I think they inherited that transition from Debian, where it's also been a bit of a pain. Part of the mess is that it wasn't just repackaging/renaming, but a switch of upstream sources too, which weren't exact drop-in replacements for each other--- teTeX hasn't been actively maintained since 2006, so Debian (and most other distros) shipped to TeX Live as their new upstream.