Okay, in the midst of your issues something may have happened to your iTunes because I am not missing that feature. Like I said, it should be the same with the iPhone and iPod Touch but maybe it's different for the iPhone. Hopefully someone with an iPhone will confirm this but meanwhile here's a screenshot of my iTunes with my iPod Touch connected and the feature to "Open iTunes when this iPod is Attached" is very much there and it works. Now granted it does begin to sync when attached but it opens automatically when I connect it. Were you looking for it to do something different?
I got the iTunes thing fixed, it was a .plist problem. But to confirm, I tested it on my Macbook, and you do have two different sets of options depending on wether or not an iPhone or iPod is connected. I had the same set of options as you with my iPod. Here are the options for the iPhone.
And to answer your other question, no I didn't want it to sync automatically. I just wanted it to open the program. But again, that was fixed once I trashed the .pref. files.
I'm more concerned about the Bluetooth issue I'm having now. (bolded in my previous post - for some reason there's an unknown item that paired with my iMac after a clean install?? Also it takes my Magic Mouse way too long to wake up my display from sleep..)
Here's a picture of the options you get with the iPhone plugged into iTunes.