Exactly. Looks like everybody's complaining that Siri isn't a better Ask Jeeves, when that's not the design goal. What people expect is an LLM that has full access to the phone. Nobody's even remotely close to shipping that.
The one caveat is that once the timer you want is two and a half hours or longer, then Siri replies by asking what you would like to convert to.
As for, "What time is it?"... Try activating Siri and only saying, "Time."
And thinking back over it, more than half the failures are complete - e.g., it likely never activated at all. Very few are "it set a timer, but for the wrong time".