I agree with you that it might be better to add it as an option but that is not such an easy action to do. And it would also require the users that now expect this behavior to change their commands on the command line. The Magick++ (C++ code of Imagemagick) code was a bug because asking the ColorType changed the ColorType. This change in ColorType should only by done by the coder that writes the tiff image. Each format has their own coder and own code to decide what to do with the ColorType. The person who wrote the tiff coder decided that it would be best to make the image as small as possible and use Gray when possible. If we added an option for this we would have to change this in all our 120+ coders :).
I also do not understand the color spaces completely. It seems there are a lot more RGB color spaces then 3 you listed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_space#Specifications). I have no idea which one ImageMagick uses for ColorSpace.RGB. We did make a switch a while back to fix the sRGB colorspace: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/color-management.php.
I also do not understand the color spaces completely. It seems there are a lot more RGB color spaces then 3 you listed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_space#Specifications). I have no idea which one ImageMagick uses for ColorSpace.RGB. We did make a switch a while back to fix the sRGB colorspace: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/color-management.php.