The cutil functionality was deleted from the CUDA 5.0 Samples (i.e. the "SDK"). You can still download a previous SDK and compile it under CUDA 5, you should then have everything that came with previous SDK's.
The official notice was given by nvidia in the CUDA 5.0 release notes (CUDA_Samples_Release_Notes.pdf, installed with the samples). As to why, I imagine that the nvidia sentiment regarding cutil probably was something like what is expressed here "not suitable for use in a real application. It is completely unsupported" but people were using it in real applications. So one way to try put a stop to that is to delete it, I suppose. That's just speculation.
Note some additional useful info provided in the release notes:
CUTIL has been removed with the CUDA Samples in CUDA 5.0, and replaced
with helper functions found in NVIDIA_CUDA-5.0/common/inc:
helper_cuda.h, helper_cuda_gl.h, helper_cuda_drvapi.h,
helper_functions.h, helper_image.h, helper_math.h, helper_string.h,
helper_timer.h
These helper functions handle CUDA device
initialization, CUDA error checking, string parsing, image file
loading and saving, and timing functions. The CUDA Samples projects no
longer have references and dependencies to CUTIL, and now use these
helper functions going forward.
So you may find useful functions in some of those header files.