It's surprising how much energy Certificate Authorities invest into arguing about this. Instead, they should invest that energy into improving their SHA-2 support and helping their customers migrate.
I don't think this is inherently a problem with the CA model. Rather it's what you'd expect in a competitive market that is basically selling a binary commodity product (a padlock icon), given textbook economics.
The Chrome team are right to push this along, but I do have some sympathy for the CA's here too. I read the whole discussion and it's pretty clear that there was some epic miscommunication going on here. Notably Google thinks that removing the padlock icon is not "deprecation" according to the timetable Microsoft established, but all the people buying certs disagree; that's why they're doing it.
No improvement? How about improvement in security?