This is intentional handling of non-existant variables, and is not resticted to '==' operations. Returning the value of a Counter parameter that has not yet been set returns 0 by default.

See the documentation here:
http://docs.python.org/library/collections.html

"Counter objects have a dictionary interface except that they return a zero count for missing items instead of raising a KeyError:"

Since this is intended behavior, I recommend this bug become closed.