Eric,
At least from the e-mail side that is only a legacy option, once you request the first email address(es) setup you will gain self-administration over your own email. As not all users use web hosting account emails now (ie: Google Apps, in-house mail servers, etc.) in many cases clients want to simply have their MX records pointed elsewhere, OR, are simply pointing their A records for their web site to our servers.
There have been a number of threads I have posted to in these forums about how/why our services are a little different. Some people hate our model, many others love it. MediaTemple put great effort into their pretty hosting control panel up front, and you have seen the results of the back-end infrastructure they put in place, this is needed if you are pushing to a bulk hosting market. We have taken the opposite approach, we have focused on the back-end infrastructure, less interest in the eye-candy, more interested in supplying our client base with a stable platform to work from. This is likely one of the reasons we have an ever increasing amount of enterprise, government, higher education institutions, and well as not only web developers using ExpressionEngine for their clients, but other popular CMS/blogging systems moving to our services.
While I would love to please the needs of 100% of the people that use our services, the reality is no product or service can provide a 100% satisfaction rating for 100% of the population.
So far this year though we have rolled out a number of new changes and services, and working with a number of developer and partners on everything from a refresh of our web site that is coming soon, to a staged roll-out of a smoother, more advanced controls for clients looking for self-administration. Part of this has been on hold until EE 2.0 is released, and our own development group at EngineHosting can better focus on the development of features we directly hear our hosting clients would most like to see.
Thank you for your thoughts on this subject, we do take notice.