There are firefox extensions that turn it into a normal entry box, although personally I love the awesome bar. I can't switch to any other browser now because I hate having to type out the whole url all the time. I can just type "hac" in my toolbar to go to hacker news.
FYI, in IE8, typing "hac" in the url bar sends you to a google search on "hac". In Safari, you end up at http://hac.com.
I can already do this with Firefox 2.0 (Firefox 3.0 from the Ubuntu repository crashed for me when I installed a new version of Ubuntu so I had to downgrade Firefox).
You can turn autocomplete off or have it only complete history/bookmarks (I just upgraded and checked.)
This turns all completion off though, even URL prefix matching (as opposed to the awesomebar 'anywhere in the URL/page title matching'), which I'm guessing you don't want. There are some entries in about:config (browser.urlbar.match*) that might make it do what you want.
Safari 4 does some subset of the super-matching thing too now; I find it kind of a mixed bag (I end up autocompleting to HN/twitter way too often) but am slightly on the side of it being helpful, although more intentional history search would probably work just as well.
I find that the awesome bar is increasingly awesome with more usage. I didn't like at all at first, but it really grew on me after a while.
As far as I know, there is no official plan to remove the "awesome bar".
Also, I can't until Ubiquity becomes standard. There's a disappointing lack of plugins for it at the moment, and standardization will really help that. :)
