Keep in mind that client developers--those who would use it--are not limited to those who write the clients. Being able to check a services setting/version number would be useful for any scripts that want to interact with the services. Giving clients more information does not force them to react in any way to the information. This would be one of the nicer feature additions because clients would not be forced to do anything in response.
But actually, the name and version of the services doesn't tell you very much. You'd also need the nickname and a command for communicating with each service to use the service. Probably you'd want a language as well, since your parsing will probably only work with the language pack it's set up for. And if services developers are going to do all of that, they may as well just work out some better interfaces for scripters.
