I was more than a little worried when I saw no "always on" option for vsync in the ATI drivers too. This was something I got used to with my GeForce 2 and 3. I haven't tested that many games yet, but so far I have been able to get vsync on in the few I've tested. ST:Voyager:Elite Force uses the Quake3 engine so I had to type "r_swapinterval 1" in the console before vsync would switch on (even though there is a vsync option in the main menu, it doesn't work).
I'm like you, I can't stand vsync off for anything but benchmarking and I hope I'm not gonna find a game I can't switch it on for.
Rob