Upvoted. While there may be reasons that this was done (I assume to minimize using HN for google juice) I don't understand why you're being downvoted for this.

This is inconvenient, and expressing that is reasonable, especially as it wasn't even a random rant, but in direct response to the clickable link being posted.

Seems like a little javascript would address this issue. PG could make the link unclickable in the HTML, but add a JS function to make it clickable, thus reconciling the goals of user convenience and google juice withholding.

Edit: Or add (rel="nofollow") of course, would be even easier.