Well the trouble is that the .lib files which they exclude *have no code in them*. They are just link libraries. The tell the linker what addresses in which dlls to use to link your executable's symbols so they are found at runtime in the proper dll at the proper address.
Now, I am not a lawyer. However, it is easy to create the missing link libraries (after all they just contain the imports for a specific dll). Actually, creating a .def file by hand and filling in the imports which you use is common practise for programming in certain environments (it's usually not necessary if we have tools to do this...). They can also be created with a simple sed script on the dll to create the .def file. Then from here you tell the linker to create the import lib. So, since you can easily recreate the .lib files (perfectly I'm not sure, but I've never had a problem with them...don't think they miss much, though maybe exports that are only listed by ordinal #, but I'm also not sure how these would be called anyhow... haven't looked at PE format too much in depth), either by hand or thorugh an automated script, it would be very hard to argue against the legality of doing so (since this is how programmers are supposed to use a .dll - they would be shooting themselves in the foot). So just search for extract exports sed for info on how to recreate the missing .lib import libraries and you should be legal (it's not reverse engineering unless some corporate a*** somehow manage to strip all our rights from us while everyones on a holiday or something...)
So, they really didn't exclude much from the bare bones tools which a serious programmer couldn't cope with... They sell customers on the IDE concept and productivity after all.
