Jeff, your use case sounds to me like a perfect candidate for a plugin (or, as JB said above, functionality that the author of a plugin that uses such information can add to that plugin itself).

It definitely doesn't need to be the default behavior to expose such information in the back-end.

A screen option? Perhaps... again, sounds like something for which it ought to be easy enough to write a plugin (for those who know how to write plugins; I'm not one of them.) :)