I considered the same thing. However, this seems like the *easiest* place to do it though, because this is a point, where you have a string that was just identified, for the first time, as being a Date. At any point prior to this in it's life cycle, there just really isn't an efficient way of identifying it, without explicitly mapping conversions, or inefficiently traversing the object looking for dates to convert.

In order for Angular to be buttery-smooth with Dates and these HTML5 controls, some sort of seamless conversion is nearly a must. Would you like me to put in a PR or two for some options regarding converting strings to dates?

I actually have a service I made to convert a string to a date, taking into account `$locale`.