lellington?

;-)

Personally I don't see the Title rendering a span as a problem, everybody is free to put it in an H1 (or whatever other element you need)  in the container.

I think a span gives you maximum flexibility since it can be used inside an inline element while remaining XHTML compliant, you should see it as the Title text IMO, not the Title block.
Adding a tag setting is fine, but why introduce extra skin processing while <h1 class="MyTitle">[TITLE]</h1> has the same result?

on a side note while you have limited "space" you can also put span tags / inline styling right into the title if you need a one off title change. :)  IE sometimes I want to just have one module with a red title while my defaults are black. Yes I could do a new container but makes no sense when its only one container on one page on one site. Not space / time efficent.