TAP is really nice, though I don't know that it's strictly necessary to build a good suite of tests; it's nice how simple it is (making it easy to use it across languages if you have more than one in your app), but I've found the testing infrastructure to be nice enough on Ruby and Python to not really have to dig into making it do TAP. Everybody has invented their own, and it all works OK.
That said, it'd be really nice if everyone could converge on a common output format, and build super nice tools for consuming it, rather than having a bunch of kinda OK tools built in a dozen different languages. I guess then the problem is that your dev toolchain then requires whatever language you're building in, plus whatever language your reporting tool is built in. And, there's always resistance to that, on almost every project I've worked on. That may be changing with API-based architectures, though...there's probably a business worth building around this problem, though you'd likely be selling to big enterprises who have heterogeneous application stacks (and selling to enterprise kinda sucks).
Is there already a CI tool that'll consume from projects in git and is smart enough to understand the individual test results? I know Jenkins has TAP support, but I haven't gotten around to setting it up yet.