Using a page (Blog template) for home page blog posts is problematic?

I bought a few themes that by default don’t have blog posts on home page as normal WordPress themes such as Twenty Eleven has. I had to create a page of Blog template and then use it for home page in Settings -> Reading.

It works, except for the pagination pages aren’t redirecting properly AND page number isn’t shown in the page title.

For example, both of these pages are accessible with or without trailing slash:

http://www.shanghaiwebhosting.com/page/3/
http://www.shanghaiwebhosting.com/page/3

And they NEVER redirect to the canonical one as normal WordPress blog pagination pages should. And the page number isn’t being displayed in <title></title>, it’s just “Page | Shanghai Web Hosting”. Seems $paged or $page variable isn’t assigned a value or something.

It’s all the same problems with another site that I used a Blog template page for the home page:

http://www.rackspacereviews.org/page/3/
http://www.rackspacereviews.org/page/3

Are both accessible and NEVER redirects. The page number is neither shown in the title tag.

Any idea why this is happening and how I can fix this? Would it be a theme issue or is it a WordPress bug?

Thanks!