A child understands this. That would be good, that would consistent, and a child of four could understand that. But that's not the way GNome does it. It will do that if there is an icon for the application in the panel, like KDE does it. Now that you've introduced a special case you've lost the child and a great many adults tooo.
Special cases are the province of adults generically and experts specifically.
I don't want my Mother to have to become a Gnome expert. I don't care to explain special cases to her since she has lived most of her life without the complexity of a PC to bother with, nor do I want to explain special cases to my nephews who are under ten. I want to show them one time, the one way it's done the fastest simplest most visual way imaginable, so they won't need me around to do it later. Personally I think it's that they think the operation through in its procedural steps and visualise an analog for each step, instead of visualising the metaphor and writing the code to follow that as closely as possible. I could be wrong.