Is Metatag Abuse an Issue?

While working on one of my little side-projects I spotted some rather interesting meta content (I also saw a lot of dross, but that’s another day’s work).
The meta tags included on the main page of a well known company’s website included explicit references to a couple of their competitors.
I didn’t have the time to examine all the subpages, but the inclusion of the competitors names in the header content was obviously deliberate.
I know that meta content isn’t as important now as it used to be, but it’s still worrying to see a company attempt to use a rival’s name in its online marketing strategy.
Has anyone else come across this recently?