I believe that Andreas did this to make it consistent with the dense case. You want to do:
julia> ones(10)'*sprand(10,10,0.1)
1x10 Array{Float64,2}:
0.871294 0.820477 0.969049 2.02607 … 0.74965 0.989042 0.0 0.991852
Both of these do not work now:
julia> ones(10)*rand(10,10)
ERROR: DimensionMismatch("A has dimensions (10,1) but B has dimensions (10, 10)")
in gemm_wrapper! at linalg/matmul.jl:295