wow, and to think that until I finally gave in and built a USB ICD2 clone, I was very close to buying a PICkit2 because it seemed like such a great little programmer, $35, small, and USB, bus powered and everything. And being made by microchip themselves, I had naturally assumed it would be fully MPLAB compatible with every PIC out there, which is an area all my other programmers were lacking in.
Guess I would have been wrong... A cheap, fully-supported USB programmer is something microchip would definitely be wise to offer, but this sounds like a rather sad attempt...