Mono, Wine, Yast, Gimp, Hurd, and how could you forget Open Office? It's GPL isn't it?
Most are Gpl because it has a sneaky little clause the Free Software Foundation lawyers use to confiscate code from others.
Most are GPL because the authors chose to release it that way. And if they decide to release their $100,000 worth of code as GPL because they're facing a copyright infringement suit, you somehow think that's wrong. But you don't think it's wrong if someone's facing a copyright infringement suit from Microsoft and has to pay up $100,000.
BTW, as far as sneaky clauses, have you seen some commercial software licenses? They'll sue you if you benchmark their application and publish the results. Surely you condemn that.
Yea just the other day I was programming and some buy from the FSF started buying me drinks, Next thing I remember I woke up in a strange server room and all my code had been released under the GPL....