Since last September, you could set browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs to 0, and you would essentially have a built-in BarTab. I slipped that in later in the Firefox 4 release cycle as a part of cascaded session restore, but it required going into about:config and changing a preference value (or installing something like BarTab Lite).

Starting with the latest nightly (and soon to be Aurora 8), browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs is no more. We’re no longer allowing you to specify a specific number of tabs to restore concurrently. Instead we now allow you to either restore on demand, or use the hard-coded 3 tabs at a time value. The new preference is called browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand. If you had customized max_concurrent_tabs and set it to 0, then restore_on_demand will be migrated to true. Unlike the old preference, restore_on_demand is exposed in the Preferences/Options dialog to make it accessible to a larger audience.

For the details, check out bug 648683.