I was referring to the *tasking* subsystem as a component, not the task object.
Anyway, after thinking on this further,  we do expose our task state to our REST callers, so nothing internal about it.  I added the method here for consistency  but agree that none of these methods add much value.  That said, I'm not going to leave this.  We can revisit later and decided if we want to provide these methods in general.