that it's possible to generate appropriate baud rates from 12 MHz.
I have already posted that you can
a) if below 4800
b) if you have a free T2


Further, if a manufacturer wants to demonstrate his hardware doing useful work he MUST provide an external UART for use by the board-resident monitor, if there is one, else he prevents the use of the on-board serial port for the end-user's target application.
glad you agree

You're right, of course, in that a debugging scheme doesn't have to use the on-board serial port for debugging. It would seem, nowever, that most of the "evaluation" boards out there do just that. In some cases one can use JTAG or some other scheme specifically supported by the MCU hardware. The dedicated hardware is certainly better than having to share a single serial port between a debugger and a target serial application. However, the "real" i805x doesn't have that feature. There simply aren't enough pins.
This is exactly why I keep pushing the SILabs derivatives (forget the f3xx deviates) for short runs because you get up to 8 ports AND for "free" (included with devboards - also available separately) you get ICE functionality. The development time with an ICE (functionality) is dramatically less (for me and a number of others I have observed).

Simulators claiming to provide precise timing data, don't cover all the available MCU's, even those that fit the classic 40 or 44 pin sites.
I know of no simulator that claim timing data, all emulators I know do provide that.

I still didn't see many applications that actually use the < 4800 baud rates, but I saw enough to suggest that they're certainly not gone forever.
that is my experiences as well, I see nothing below 9600

Why are so many users resigned to using 11.0592 MHz when 11.9808 or even 12.000 will work adequately?
try them at the keil baudrate calculator and you will see

http://www.keil.com/c51/baudrate.asp (down right now)

and do not use T2 (see above why not)

Erik