Great point. I noticed the same thing. First you get your Google Apps account, and then the passwords for the other accounts are mailed to there, then two weeks later you find that one of the systems has been replaced in favour of another one.
Indeed tedious and error-prone.
And that's just from the employee's point of view, the administrator having to create all these different accounts is probably even less happy about it.
bringing on new employees or terminating existing ones and having to do it across half a dozen different sites sounds kind of tedious and error-prone.