Lousy performance on "IN" clause on system views

Ran into a lousy performing SQL today on Oracle 11.2.0.3, Windows 2008 64-bit, and it really surprised me:

SET AUTOTRACE ON

SELECT

   COUNT(*),

   SUM(BYTES)

FROM

   DBA_EXTENTS

WHERE

   SEGMENT_NAME IN (

      SELECT

         INDEX_NAME

      FROM

         DBA_INDEXES

      WHERE

         TABLE_NAME = 'CUSTOMER');

Statistics

----------------------------------------------------------

       7884  recursive calls

       1157  db block gets

    1706525  consistent gets

       8407  physical reads

          0  redo size

        606  bytes sent via SQL*Net to client

        500  bytes received via SQL*Net from client

          2  SQL*Net roundtrips to/from client

          0  sorts (memory)

          0  sorts (disk)

          1  rows processed

What's going on here that deserves such a lousy performance?

I tried doing a simple join instead on an IN clause, and it performs somewhat poorly too: