The default android counter is lacking, however there are quite a few in the Play store and Facebook actually promotes one inside their app.

Being an AUstralian 4G consumer, not using a data usage monitoring app is a recipe for "having a bad day".

This is a customer problem, govt needs to ignore people being stupid. If a customer buys 200mb of data and doesn't know what/how much that is the customer needs to educate themselves. The telcos here even provide usage meters in their apps and update within minutes most of the time. Even in Vietnam I can send a txt to 888 with the phrase "data" and it tells me how much data is left.

Niantic need to be completely dismissive of this whole data usage situation...

Is the government going to send a letter about battery usage next because the average play time is higher than other app usage and when the user moves away from the house where the power cord is the user might not realise that the battery is going down faster?

Yes, and I believe iOS gives the same breakdown (though it is not as intuitive to read, and it gives all-time-since-you-reset-the-counter data usage totals).