Interestingly wikipedia also states "In the 19th century, grammarians in England petitioned the British Parliament to declare gender-indeterminate pronouns as 'he' rather than 'they', which was common usage at the time. "
The english language is far from a codified, logically consistent system.
Just as frustrating is writing that switches pronoun gender when referring to ostensibly the same person. However describing some operation between two people "Alice and Bob" it can improve clarity to make both people belong to different genders.
As to using she it's very common convention these days in some domains. Many books on games use that for example (chess, bridge, go, poker - you need to a pronoun for black/white/last to act player there ). I also saw some computer science books using it. At this point I would say it's so common that it becomes part of the language. I personally like it although I can see how it raises eyebrows when encountered for the first time :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Generic_he
Anything else is just politically correct nonsense.