It's worth pointing out that although it's invalid HTML, it's also extremely common, and any browser that didn't support it would fail to render properly a significant portion of the web.
Mash-ups in particular, need use of this feature, and HTML 5 defines <style scoped> to deal with this use case. <style scoped> can appear in the body, though styles so defined do not apply to the whole document, only to the section in which <style scoped> appears.
WARNING: HTML 5 is a draft, and there is no guarantee that <style scoped> or any other HTML 5 feature that is not already implemented will ever be implemented.