Why is . not in the path by default?

You answered correctly your own question, that's exactly why dot isn't in the path:
To protect against childish viruses or honest mistakes.

Of course, this is a very lame and useless anti-virus measure, and nothing stops you from adding dot to the path yourself.

Yes. If you put the "." in the path, you would end up sending a lot of command calls to the files in your current directory.

Even if it was last, there is still pilot error. For example, Solaris 10 lacks "top". I type "top" on my system all day long, because I think I'm on a system that has "top".

More than a security risk, having '.' in the PATH make almost impossible to make it sure that the execution of any command acts as intended. Think about running a command like 'zip' in a huge directory containing thousand of files with random names. The possibility that one of them is actually named 'zip' is not negligible and would lead to an error which is very difficult to understand (actually the file should be executable, which, however, might happen).

In particular this is true when writing scripts that keep the PATH variable of the user. A good written script should deal with all corner cases (like filenames with spaces in them or starting with '-'). But it is impractical to prevent a file in the current directory being executed instead of a system command...