You have to remember that a number of the design team started of at Sinclair Research and worked on the LOKI project.
Sinclairs design philosophy was always to invovate on the cheap and leave it to the programmers to figure out stuff that pushed the hardware to the limits, just look at the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum.
I still find it amazing the stuff that programmers created on a 3.5mhz Z80, cheap custom ULA and a single channel beeper. It certainly was never designed to shift fast wired polygons with hidden lines or fully filled polygons in games, but it did.
It seems to me thats what the Jaguar is the embodiment of and as CJ said it will do what you program it to do nothing more and it's up to the programmer to decide how to do it within the hardware constraints.