I agree with the sentiment of what (I think) you're trying to get at. However, the problem that some people have raised is that there are many different task m

I agree with the sentiment of what (I think) you're trying to get at. However, the problem that some people have raised is that there are many different task management/project management systems out there, and clients interfacing with multiple technology suppliers may not want to learn all of them. Email has one (simple) interface that you can use to delegate tasks to all your suppliers regardless of what management software they use. Furthermore, the client creating the task may not be able to describe it to the same extent that an engineer needs, or know enough to fill out all the meta data required. To this end, they send their task via email to the engineer (or project manager) and this person enters it into their company's management tool, transmuting it into the appropriate technical specs/jargon at this point. This may seem like an "extra step", but there are tools for Outlook/gmail to create tasks in popular task management software such as JIRA or Basecamp. Furthermore, someone will likely still have to clean the data up to make it engineer friendly, and assign it to someone. As long as this has to be done, it doesnt seem like copying/pasting an email into a task description is really that much extra work.