Given we have to jump through so many hoops regarding caching systems such as Varnish etc to get any kind of decent performance, the least a default installation could do would be to make it automatically optimise with mod_pagespeed. Magento installations are the only sites I run where I have to turn it off completely. The problem seems to be knockout.js. Can only imagine how fast a site with both caching and optimised html would be.
More info: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mod-pagespeed-discuss/FtdyLTVPRLc