poll can't guarantee that the next read will succeed because first of all doesn't know how many pages you are interested in reading and any relevant page in the page cache might be evicted between the poll and the read.
Also having pread, which is designed for concurrency and scalability, carry state around for poll (an unbounded amount of state btw: you can have multiple threads issuing concurrent preads on the same fd) makes it completely pointless.
There are linux patches floating to add flags to preadv2 so that on a page not present it returns EAGAIN, so that you can optimistically do a sync read an fall back to a thread pool in the slow case. It still doesn't involve poll and friend.
poll() can't guarantee that the next read will succeed anyway, because something else might drain the socket or fifo (e.g. another thread). Programmers simply use O_NONBLOCK anyway and use poll() is wait until the process should try again.
pread() is an unusual case. I'd be happy if poll() simply indicated read() would succeed, and I'm happy doing an lseek() before every read().
However a pread() with O_NONBLOCK could return EAGAIN and poll() would then know what pages I'm interested in.
> what action, within posix, would you take to change it?
The general (POSIX-compatible) strategy (as I indicated) has been to fork a thread off to handle reading so that my application is notified when the data is in the fifo. This works for me when I'm reading (say) five files from a slow (or remote) storage, but it's not ideal since it causes a copy.