Clean up Drupal pagination

Clean URL's are a major draw card for Drupal, but it is too bad that the clean URL structure ends at the category and node level. All pagination in Drupal produces ugly query strings at the category and node level. See here for more details;

http://drupal.org/node/187675

I assume this is done to a design limitation at the time the Drupal pager was developed? If so are these limitations still valid? If not, are they able to be replaced with something which is more human readable and memorable?