RVO/NRVO and public undefined copy constructor

I'm fighting the following proposal now, and I want to know legal and for lesser extent moral arguments against it or for it.

What we had:

#include <vector>

class T;

class C
{
public:
    C() { }
    ~C( ) { /*something non-trivial: say, calls delete for all elements in v*/ }
    // a lot of member functions that modify C
    // a lot of member functions that don't modify C
private:
    C(C const &);
    C& operator=(C const&);
private:
    std::vector< T* > v;
};

void init(C& c) { } // cannot be moved inside C

// ...
int main()
{
    // bad: two-phase initialization exposed to the clients
    C c;
    init(c);

    // bad: here follows a lot of code that only wants read-only access to c
    //      but c cannot be declared const
}

What has been proposed:

#include <vector>

class T;

class C
{
public:
    C() { }
    ~C( ) { /*calls delete for all elements in v*/ }

    // MADE PUBLIC
    C(C const &); // <-- NOT DEFINED

    // a lot of member functions that modify C
    // a lot of member functions that don't modify C
private:
    C& operator=(C const&);
private:
    vector< T* > v;
};

C init() // for whatever reason object CANNOT be allocated in free memory
{
    C c;
    // init c
    return c;
}

// ...
int main()
{
    C const & c = init();
}

This compiles and links (and works) using recent g++ (which is the only target compiler) both 4.1.2 and 4.4.5 -- because of (N)RVO the copy-constructor is never called; destructor is called at the end of main() only.

It is claimed that the technique is perfectly fine, because there is no way copy-constructor could be mis-used (if it ever have been generated it would be linker error), and making it public prevents compiler for complaining about private one.

It looks really-really wrong for me to use such trick, which I feel contradicts the C++ spirit and looks more