Tabs and Searching

As you gain more experience with Salesforce, you come to run into limits that make you think "why did they put that limit?"  One of such feature is searching custom object.  Over a year ago, we had a project with a customer who had quite a few custom objects in its org and had used up all their tabs.   One of the requirements for the project is to enable the search on a new custom object, but when we have set all the search layout, we weren't seeing the object in the search.  After some googling, we found out that you can search a custom object only if you have custom tab associated with it.  When we had contacted Salesforce support, we found out that you could purchase additional tabs just so that you can enable additional searching.  Also, you could implement your own Visualforce searching page, but I still find this to be rather strange limitation.