Andy,
I made my comment about 'hate mail' somewhat tongue in cheek. Being an engineer myself I can understand that there was constraints for the technology they were using when it was designed and the fact they made it so flexible and the design has lasted many years suggests they did a pretty good job. I wonder if the samsung equiv gets around the speed issues?

There are many devices that have gotchas that aren't explicitly noted in the spec sheets -

1/ dual port ram -most manufacturers don't warn about the problems of reading/writing the same location on both ports (writing both is obvious)

2/ 4000 series cmos - some devices would load up the input if the output was loaded. This was more a repair issue rather than a design issue.

3/ Switch mode supplies - many have a minumum load spec,and many people have ignored this at their own peril.

There's probably many more that we have been bitten from at least once. Hopefully we get wiser from the experience!