Absolutely, I love that it’s there and SEO should be 100% the driving factor, however for many clients that is a huge strategy. One thing to be clear about, for article/collection listings it’s fine to paginate, however if you want a widget or section which contains posts and that need paginating, then the issue is more relevant.
Hopefully someone does pick up on this, as well as the issue you have highlighted as it does mean we need to hack quite a bit.