WordPress 1.5 Options Page Plugin Bug: This bug is with regards to plugins and options pages created by plugins. Thanks for pointing this out Alex and yes, the idea is to use the right solution, regardless of this bug when coding for the plugin competition. In other words, consider this bug to be fixed in the version of WordPress that will be used to test the competition plugins.
Hey, thanks for the traffic. Had I known this many people would be interested, I would have posted it to these sites sooner.
While you are at it… you may want to check out:
Hacking WordPress get_option() Unserialization by Eric Anderson
It demostrates a way to get get_option() to work with objects.