Why are pingbacks and trackbacks treated as comments?

Is there any benefit whatsoever to lumping pingbacks/trackbacks together with comments? Because there are major disadvantages:

1) Moderation rules can’t be set separately for comments and pingbacks/trackbacks.

2) Recent Comments widgets become useless when they get overrun by pingback spam. Even legitimate pingbacks are distracting.

I know that in an idealistic world, everyone would be considerate and trackbacks/pingbacks wouldn’t be a huge liability. But that whole system is seriously flawed in the real world.

There’s got to be a solution other than disabling them entirely. Personally, i would like to have an option that marks all new pingbacks/trackbacks as spam.

Then i can sort through them and approve the few legitimate ones without the bad ones showing up where my visitors can see them before i do.