Yeah, they're pretty rare in Australia due to our reliance on ADSL - unless you flash with DD-WRT. It's still not something everyone does. OpenWRT and DD-WRT's UIs are pretty rough (although, most commercial UIs are, too)
I'm running OpenWRT on a TP-Link TL-WR841N/ND v8 and the LuCI interface that comes out of box is vastly better (cleaner and more feature-full) than the majority of consumer router interfaces I've encountered. In particular, the realtime graph of current connections!
You can likely set your ADSL modem into "bridge mode" and put a user-flashable device between that and your network. Once you get NBN you just connect the WAN port to the NBN termination box and you'll be getting DHCP from your ISP.
