Why does a microwave have a world-oriented clock anyway?

There were two entertaining posts about microwave clocks on the IxDG discussion list this weekend. First this by Hans Samuelson:

Another question: Why does a microwave have a world-oriented clock anyway? I have other clocks in the kitchen that are dedicated to the job of telling me the time, that do it better than the microwave, and that have dedicated, simple, easily understood and retained controls for setting the time. Do people actually set up time-dependent tasks for their microwaves like they do for their VCRs ("I will require 10 minutes 25 seconds of cooking time at power level 8, from 6:12 to 6:22 this evening")? Wouldn't a purely internal, cooking task-oriented clock be enough? Is there a reason for having a constantly glowing clock, normally fairly unattractive, that requires my attention from time to time without offering anything particular in return?

Featuritis, perhaps?

Followed by this by Peter Bagnall:

Just as an incidental--I have seen some microwaves which do indeed have a way to burn your popcorn to a crisp at a pre-specified time. So it is technically possible to come home to freshly burn popcorn, or more worryingly, given what happens to the average roasting potato in a microwave if cooked for too long, it's entirely likely you could come home to a carefully pre-programmed house-fire instead.

I would argue that since microwaves are far too stupid to switch themselves off when their contents burst into flame, any feature which allows (even encourages) completely unsupervised cooking is not only an unnecessary feature, but worse a potentially dangerous one. Convenience is great so far, but I'm not going to treat something as being completely dependable if the failure modes include burning my house to the ground.