We should always use the pretty date convertor when displaying dates, because presumably everyone understands "June 1, 2001" or whatever.
Failure to do so is simple laziness on the part of the person who implemented the code in the first place.
As far as the timezone stuff mentioned by Carl goes, that's a good idea but I don't want to tackle it in a hodge-podge manner. And the porting effort's going a bit slowly as it is, so let's get that entered into the SDM as a feature request to be tackled after porting (and, Carl, if you want to think about a systematic approach for 4.x feel free to post about it).
