It's not an oversight (there has been much discussion about this limitation on the forums), more a consequence of some of the design decisions of how mods work: factorio runs a lockstep simulation model, so all the clients need to operate deterministically and consistently across for all players. This includes the mods, so the modding API is deliberately restricted to only information which is in common between all players. Due to internationalisation, the names and descriptions can be different between players, and this could easily introduce desyncs between players.
Now, there's a bunch of possible solutions to this problem (I think the best approach is to have the concept of a UI mod which can affect the interface but not the game world. As an added benefit you could allow users to have different sets of UI mods installed and not depend on the server using it), but the engineering effort involved is not so simple as just adding another part to the API (and factorio developers are generally going to try to do something well if they do it).
Now, there's a bunch of possible solutions to this problem (I think the best approach is to have the concept of a UI mod which can affect the interface but not the game world. As an added benefit you could allow users to have different sets of UI mods installed and not depend on the server using it), but the engineering effort involved is not so simple as just adding another part to the API (and factorio developers are generally going to try to do something well if they do it).