Why doesn't "ifconfig" display "Link Status" (carrier status)?

[Fermulator]

In UNIX (freeBSD in particular), we're accustomed to seeing the "carrier" status in the "ifconfig" output:

[fermulator@freebsd1: ~]$ ifconfig
em0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
	options=b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU>
	inet6 (snip)8%em0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1 
	inet (snip) netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.222.255
	ether (snip)
	media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseTX <full-duplex>)
	status: active

Yet, in Linux, we don't get the "status" field:

fermulator@fermmy:~$ ifconfig eth0
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr (snip)  
          inet addr:1.0.0.6  Bcast:1.0.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: (snip)/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:36726481 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:33653068 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:4069044272 (4.0 GB)  TX bytes:4034247698 (4.0 GB)
          Interrupt:19

There are other tools available in linux to display the status:

fermulator@fermmy:~$ sudo ethtool eth0 | grep Link
	Link detected: yes

fermulator@fermmy:~$ sudo ifplugstatus eth0
eth0: link beat detected

... but what happened to the status field in ifconfig?

Does anyone know why it's no longer present? A few of us on IRC (freenode, Ubuntu) feel like this is a bug.

NOTE: Tested this on
* Ubuntu 10.10 (2.6.35-30-generic), with net-tools package (1.60-23ubuntu3)
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.6 (2.6.18-238.el5), with net-tools package (net-tools-1.60-81.el5)

[zackwasa]

it does not seem like a bug, it seems like a feature that was not added into the ifconfig command in Linux