Why can't I copy images out of Pages?

I am a very heavy user of Pages and have been since it arrived as an alternative to other word processors. That said, over the past decade of using this app, there has been one major continuing annoyance I have experience with Pages... why can't we ever copy an image out of Pages to another app?

This is violation of what seems to me intuitive, that if I can paste an image into an app I should be able to copy an image out in some form.

In fact if you take a copy of the saved Pages file, change the file extension from .pages to .zip, you can uncompress the file and find all the images in the Pages file are stored as PDFs internally. It is not beyond Apple's capability to rasterize a PDF and allow (maybe via a 'Copy as...' menu item) extraction of the image to allow manipulation of the image before pasting it back in.

For now, I typically enlarge the images on screen and use a screen capture to rasterize the result, but it should be possible to do this...