Do you think the HTML spec should do something differently? You can discuss spec feedback here, but you should send it to the WHATWG mailing list or file a bug in the W3C bugzilla for it to be considered.
I understand that there are issues to keep everything compatible with previous standards, but I think that some stuff like forms elements have a presentational tag that's device dependent an perhaps should be rendered better with CSS or other mechanism, like the difference between using a checkbox/radiobutton list and a select list seems to be only in the shape, since he function is the same.