You can by the way with floating windows also build a splitscreen layout.
that's very cumbersome.
I was at pulling all the time to make the current needed view big enough to see what i want to see.
all applications i know have a [maximize current view] hotkey. but i know... you don't like hotkeys.
Which means they waited as long as possible to do this unpopular step.
no, they didn't wait as long as possible but as long as necessary. 2.5 is a huge amount of work and is only possible now that they have 2 or 3 full time developers (possible also because of the open movie money) and about 50 (more or less) active "free time" developers. some also work on blender as part of their university projects.
