Using this indirection might have been very clever and solved a problem for someone, somewhere. But it does make the Games folder virtually useless. Quite a few games have special options to suppress playing the startup videos, enable unusual video modes, turn on cheats or 3rd-party mod loading. Add to that the older games that don't have Game folder shortcuts and I don't think I've launched a game from the Game folder in months.
I don't think Microsoft involved any actual game players in the design. :-)