Printing broken in Ubuntu? Try lpr

Lately I've seen quite a few Ubuntu machines with broken printing (more broken than usual, that is). Sometimes printers are detected, sometimes not. When it doesn't work you usually get a warning saying "Getting printer information failed" even though the printer is connected and you can even ping it. Searching around a little bit I read a couple of threads and bug reports that make me think that it's actually a Gnome 3 migration problem, but I'm not sure. It doesn't matter much anyway: screw UIs, just use lpr < foo.pdf from a CLI and keep on killing forests!

On a cheerful closing note: how funny is it that when the regular printing applet in Gnome is broken we have to use a utility by "Apple Inc"?