Chatter around titles

It looks like there's some chatter around the title element versus
meta title, etc. I wanted to throw in and get some clarification on
its content model.

If the title element is supposed to be equivalent to <meta
property="title">, it occurs to me that its content model should match
the meta element's production of Text* rather than PCDATA*.

As far as I can ascertain the following are equivalent:

<title>foo</title>
<title content="foo"/>
<meta property="title">foo</title>
<meta property="title" content="foo"/>

But it occurs to me that these two should also be equivalent:

<title><em>Important!</em></title> <!-- illegal -->
<meta property="title"><em>Important!</em></meta>

I know that the title element in HTML 4 and the older XHTMLs are
PCDATA*, but does it make sense to carry forward? I can foresee
potential implications on the parts of user agents but little more
than would already exist to support the format at large.

Regards,

--
Dorian Taylor
http://doriantaylor.com/