I do admit I was wondering if anyone would call me on that... :-P
The point about pets being part of the hunter class lore-wise is a possible counter (at least, if you think the lore has any meaning at all since Cataclysm's cacophony of deus ex machina and nonsense, which I don't)... it just frustrates me that there's literally no way to play an archer in this game. There's a bunch of niche classes that aren't represented in WoW, but archer is the only big archetype that I can think of that isn't represented in any meaningful way...
Edit: Ranged pets would solve the problem of having to micro-manage pets that do stupid things in melee, but wouldn't fix my conceptual problem. Keep in mind I do like the hunter class, I just don't consider it an archer, and whenever possible I play beast mastery (since as far as I'm concerned, that's the only spec that's actually appropriate to the Hunter... the original Survival tree was, but its current form of "poison caster" is only sorta appropriate... again, my opinion only.)