This has been a bone of contention for quite some time between the various DB camps. For a database system as polished and well-built as Oracle, it still stuns me that it requires so much code and effort to enable this commonly-used and valuable feature.
I recommend just putting some kind of incremental-primary-key builder/function/tool in your toolkit and have it handy for Oracle work. And write your congressman and tell him how bad they need to make this feature available from the GUI or using a single line of SQL!