ORDER BY and LIMIT clauses needs a Reducer task which isn't the case with a LOAD as Pig runs only Map tasks.  Initially, I planned to just support a LOAD statement of the form below similar to the PhoenixHBaseStorage
  A = LOAD 'hbase/table/HIRES' using org.apache.phoenix.pig.PhoenixHBaseLoader('localhost');
However, since people had asked for providing support for SELECT queries also, I notice these confusions are arising. We can provide support for a SELECT query but it will be a simple SELECT query with a support for WHERE clause without any aggregations, topN queries.

My bad, I shouldn't have used the word "hand off" above though I meant to say hand the code for a release.