While I agree that it has some real shortcomings, there are also
shortcomings to having the user-land equivalents be totally divorced
from alternatives. There are also shortcomings to having the KDE and
Gnome equivalents be divorced from each other and having to set default
browsers in both.
In the Gnome case its even worse because the panel doesn't have a good
way to put "default web browser" on it. So you get one browser for
dingus-click and one for panel. Endless pain and suffering