I find it odd that no one seems to realize how broken this is.

Every other browser vendor seems to have no problems implementing standards as they emerge

That's just wrong. Take FF4, for example, there is a lot of stuff that it doesn't implement still. It only looks good in comparison to IE9. It looks a lot less good if you compare it to every draft that's out there.

more likely to be what a standard is supposed to be: a codification of what everyone is already doing. This is far more useful than some sort of proclamation from upon high.

This is contradictory. The way standards for HTML5 have generally worked is that a smaller set of web vendors have made a proclamation from upon high that this is the now the web (albeit in flux). "What everyone is already doing" apparently is Opera (who appears to be the furthest out front), and not IE. That's like WebOS defining the new appstore standard and telling Apple to get in line.

I so hope IE10 comes out with a whole bunch of new features that no one else has and then pushes those into the standard. Just to hear everyone whine about how they're now rushing to market with features that haven't been fully ratified.