Customers may wish to create opportunity records in their workspace without a parent if these are opportunities for new customers, and they would like to determine interest and if the customer is somebody who would qualify for their sales. They can then create the company/contact record later once the opportunity has been discussed with the customer, and it is determined to be a valid sale. If you have a territory restriction set, and you try to create an opportunity with no parent, this will cause the opportunity to fail to create with a restriction error.
@Jason Howard really sounds like this customer should be using enquiries for this use-case and not opportunies...