This is by design, otherwise legal creative commons scrapers demolish us in search rankings. Your concerns are unfounded, in fact, it's *quite the opposite..* Matt Cutts himself signed off on this approach and endorsed it in an email to me.

See:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/71906/first-tag-in-the-title-of-the-page-is-not-that-convenient

and

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/71982/scrapers-enter-the-scene-was-the-choice-of-license-right

for details.

I would also argue that this encourages proper and correct tagging of questions. **If the tag is objectionable in the title, then it's probably a bad tag practice** -- as you pointed out!