I agree. And that's just fine for 99% of the bloggers that will never reach 1 million pageviews/month. Most of those queries are unnecessary. But rather than fix the root of the problem, we put the whole database in memory. Run out of memory? No problem, move to a solid state drive! LOL.
Even a small site with a low level of traffic can bring a modest DB server to it's knees without caching of some type. It's really ridiculous but just due to the modular nature of WordPress.