Not saying it's not useful, just that this arose from them not using a hard-coded comma, but referencing some default separator, that happens to be the semi-colon in some locales. I might be wrong and this could have an older precedent.

Now, whether it would've been better to stick with the comma and just properly quote all the values for locales where the comma is a decimal separator and thus often used in spreadsheet columns is a moot point, the damage has been done.

Personally I just call it "character separated values" anyway. I quite like tab-separated values. Makes it okay to read quite often and I think it's the default output of Postgres' COPY command.