Add raster values to feature table

[DuaneGriffin]

A basic task in much environemntal work (especially climatology and ecology) is to get values for a range of variables for points (GPS, wells, etc). Why isn't it possible to have ArcGIS query a stack of rasters and add the associated values to fields in the point layer's attribute table?

For that matter, why can't we do the same thing with lines or polygons without having to go through zonal statistics as table, which only works sort of (e.g. not on 16 or 32 bit signed ints).  This is such a basic task that it should be a simple one-shot operation.