Mages have plenty of damage related abilities baseline. Being forced to go to your talents for damage abilities is *not* a virtue -- being envious of other classes because their talents are wasted on such things that ought to be baseline for a DPS class is silly.

Not really, just take warlocks as an example
Like us, they are a pure DPS spec, unlike us they get a choice of one of three interesting DPS cooldowns (actually, two of their tiers offer DPS utility as they can provide additional AOE on their filler spells with one choice).
None of these are essential baseline abilities that you cast to make damage and every warlock will have a cooldown that increases their DPS, it is the fact that they get a choice in how they do this that is interesting.

I agree with you that direct damage spells should not be talents! That would be silly.
But tiers that are helpful in that they directly increase your DPS rather than doing it indirectly via helping you move faster or live longer are things that other classes have and we don't, and they interest me far more than a choice of which barrier I want.

@Artificial
Now go and tell it to Warlocks who have more then a couple of damage-based brand new talents

@Orrine: You're making my point for me. :) Given how sucky their baseline is, yes, they'll be happy to have those talents. They'd be happier still if they didn't need them. But then they'd be mages...