@mattly I often see people complaining about this. Unfortunately, the disabling/hiding solution might be even worse. People who clicked/Tabbed to the password field would then pay extra attention to their keyboard (because passwords are masked), so would take a while to realise that the field they thought they were typing into had gone AWOL.
Alternatively, consider what icloud.com does: hide the password field by default, but if needed, reveal and focus it on the same page, not a separate page.