Steam keeps running after shutdown?

[miome]

So, I've got Steam installed and working, and Portal is pretty fun! It does cause heat issues, but not too badly. I was able to play at least 45 minutes without things going critical. After shutting it down I did have to restart the network once.

I noticed something strange, though. After I shut down Steam, there was still a running process. I was able to get it to stop with /bin/launchctl remove com.valvesoftware.steam.ipctool. I wonder if that's intentional? To me, having a constantly-running nanny program is completely unacceptable. Maybe it looks different to members of the facebook generation ...