Well, it's more of a bug fix than a hack - that's the way it was supposed to be done, it was just broken.
But you're right, there should be somewhere in the CMS to set/edit site-wide variables, like the site name, tag-lines etc. Maybe also setting default Meta-data that individual pages can append their keywords etc to. Clicking on the "Site Content" globe in the tree seems like a logical place to me.
Didn't I read somewhere that someone's working on a GUI for editing _config.php stuff?