You're right, I should just learn direct AVR programming at this point. I prefer using the arduino dev environment because I have limited time to work on this stuff, however. There are some applications where 8 pins is advantageous from a size perspective and more than enough processing power.
With this support it would be great if the IDE could "upload a sketch" using the USBTinyISP programmer.
In the standard distribution, we only include support for processors that are on an official Arduino board. However, people have made cores that run on the ATtiny85, and it's possible to install these separately: http://arduino.cc/en/Guide/Environment#thirdpartyhardware