Wanted to eject a disk back then? Drag it onto the trash can. Not the most clever ui decision in the days when formatting floppy disks was a common task.
Yes, but there was still good reason to hate it - what about users who learned the pattern the other way?
It sounds silly, but ejecting disks was about as common as deleting local content. Overlapping "delete" functionality with anything else still threatens to cause unintended deletes, even if this was better than the reverse.
(It's still fuzzy with Volumes in OS X, where you can click an 'eject' button that effectively deletes downloaded content if you haven't copied it out. Check out how many Volumes low-confidence users have running some time.)
Eject is a lot safer than format.