The fire elemental is technically the pet of the totem and the totem itself is more of a guardian than a pet. The ability has to be completely rebuilt for it to work like a proper pet. It sure needs to be done though!

Agreed. Blizz could solve the problem immediately if they just made the Fire Elemental work like the Shadowfiend does (I love that little guy on my priest). It seems rather silly to me that such an important cooldown for elemental shaman is so glitchy and wonky.

I seem to remember a blue post either from when the new assist functionality of pets came out or perhaps in one of the dev Q&A things where they had mentioned the issues of the totem elementals and searing totem. I believe it had said they were going to review how it worked for the pet classes and if all went well try and implement the same assist target functionality for those totems. That could be a possible fix.

And like Skarn said, the reason there's no pet toolbar at this time is because the elemental is tied to the totem, not to the shaman.

I was looking at skada logs last night after Nef. It showed Fire Elemental as the top damage spell for our resto shaman, so yeah, it works.