I write automated trading software. If I created a bug, I'd much prefer my program just stop working rather than no-op out a hedging routine or no-op out a regulatory compliance routine. There are also plenty of safety-critical applications where a machine would be perfectly safe if it just stopped working, but would kill someone if it no-opped out a routine. I could see a photo hosting site accidentally giving people without accounts access to everyone's private photos because a filtering routine got no-opped out.
I'll grant you that there are a few small domains where this would be desirable behavior, but I think if it's that much of an advantage, those domains should have domain-specific languages. Skipping method calls on null objects is a terrible feature for a general purpose programming language.
I would not want to work on code that relies on this type of behavior since it would be so easy to overlook. Every time an object gets deferenced I would have to consider that it might no-op and consider how that might affect the rest of the program's execution.
If you really want to 'drop' calls to null objects, be explicit about it and only make the call inside of a conditional that checks that the object is not null. Your fellow programmers will thank you.
Most of the time it is much better that a program crashes instead of silently operating under incorrect assumptions. This is particularly true if the software is doing something critical. But even if it's a casual game, do you want to risk corrupting your costumers' saves?
The following blog post makes basically the same argument, but not about null pointers specifically: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/08/whats-worse-than-cr...