During certification, we look at something called "Return to Land" - basically there is a serious emergency shortly after a Max Weight TO (e.g. uncontrollable fire), and you need to land ASAP - significant fuel dumping is not an option. It may not be pretty, and you want the pilots to be on their 'A' game, but it's required to be possible (and safe) to do a MTOW landing at the departure airport (since you just left there at MTOW, it presumably has a reasonably long runway). This of course assumes that whatever went wrong didn't significantly affect landing/stopping distances.
Personally I've been on a enough overweight landings during flight testing that I don't really see it as being that big of deal so long as the pilots know what they're doing and you're not talking something like a short and/or contaminated/slick runway.