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It makes absolutely no sense to render a separate shadow channel without the chance to exclude the shadows from the main rendering!

Ok, you can use the shadow render as alpha, but that is not really cool! Just try to soften the shadow without soften the other stuff...

I'd brought this up in the past and would agree with you. The response (from Tom, as I recall) was that the intention of the shadow channel wasn't so much for flexibility in post-process (as you'd typically think of with a shadow pass), but rather for comping purposes. This also explains why you have to turn on the shadow channel for each material individually.

So for example, in a recent project I rendered a flat plane for my grass and then wanted to comp in a grass field. So I checked the material for my grass plane to render shadows for my shadow channel. Then I pasted in my grass field and used the MatID channel to make a selection of my grass area and used that selection as a mask. So at that point I had my grass photo showing up only where it should be. However, what I'd covered up were areas where, for example, a tree was casting shadow on my grass plane. So I put the shadow layer on top and set it to multiply.

That isn't to say that i agree that the functionality you suggest should be an option. I just point this out to show you the rationale behind the way it currently works.

-Brodie