Great point!

I'd then suggest that formatting that always conveys meaning (bold, italics, etc) should be copy/pasted.

On the other hand, formatting that often doesn't convey meaning (font face, foreground color, background color, shadows, etc) should not be copied by default.

A three-way option to system-wide (and per application) configure the behavior for control/command + x/c/v would be nice:

    * smart copy/paste (what I just described) as the default
    * copy/paste as plain text
    * copy/paste with full formatting