I was very surprised by it when I noticed it a year or so ago. What's interesting is that when it works, eg you have a directory with numbers from 1-10, you don't really notice it. It isn't until it bites you in the ass, eg your downloads folder with a bunch long numeric strings, some in hex, where you want to find one and suddely it's not where you expect.

I used a gui software some years ago that distinguished between version sort and alphabetic sort. It would be handy to have a toggle.