It makes the templates really, really ugly.

Depends on how you do it. Myself, I use Template Toolkit and right off the bat I created a widgets/ directory in my base template directory. This widgets directory contains a different template for each of the form fields (text inputs, textareas, radio buttons, select fields, etc). My select field template is exactly what is below. I'm not even sure now if the SET option.selected = '' line is needed. I think I had to add it because of some weird complication (perhaps the option.selected value wasn't being reset in each iteration of the loop?).

[% USE HTML %]
[% DEFAULT size = 1 %]

<select name="[% HTML.escape(name) %]" size="[% size %]" class="frmSel
+ect">

[% FOREACH option = options %]
    [%
        SET option.selected = '';
        SET option.selected = ' selected="selected"' IF option.value =
+= selected;
        DEFAULT option.label = option.value;
    %]

    <option value="[% HTML.escape(option.value) %]"[% option.selected 
+%]>[% HTML.escape(option.label) %]</option>
[% END %]

</select>
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Now within any html template that wants to include a select field, all it takes it this simple include:

[% INCLUDE widgets/select.tmpl
    name="fav_flavour"
    selected="$fav_flavour"
    options=[
        { value => 'Chocolate', label => 'brown stuff' },
        { value => 'Vanilla', label => 'plain stuff' },
        { value => 'Strawberry', label => 'red stuff' }
    ]
%]
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