That is not the keyboard map. It's the engraving, which has zero effect on the keyboard, neither electrical nor mechanical. Keyboards can be re-labelled with little bits of paper and sticky tape or by swapping keytops, and that does nothing. There is no keyboard map here.
Of course keyboards can be relabeled. But they usually aren't. If, hypothetically, keyboards came with knowledge of their original labeling, that would be meaningful information. If computers used it to set a default key layout, that would make for a better default if the goal is to make key behavior match the labeling. It would fail to match the labeling if you changed the labeling, but it would still be accurate much more often than the current default.
That said, I question whether most people actually want key behavior to match the labeling. I think any touch typist would rather use their preferred layout regardless of labeling.
As a recovering Dvorak user, I would very much like the match-the-legends behavior, because for quite a long time I used a keymap which was not the default. At one job I had an Advantage2 that I carried around with me because the keys were internally remapped (when you pressed a key it reported the scancode for that letter on QWERTY) because of how time consuming it is to add a keyboard layout in most operating systems. Unfortunately that kind of internal remapping is mostly only found in some very expensive keyboards. There's at least one vendor that sells a USB dongle that does the same remapping to a pass-through USB keyboard for the same reason.
This problem would be infrequently encountered in the US (mostly just Dvorak and Colemak addicts) but is a lot more common in Europe due to AZERTY.
Yeah, but for 99% of keyboards the legends were put there by the manufacturer who could also burn into the controller firmware what scheme of legends was used. This way the OS could autodetect whether the keyboard was e.g. QWERTY or AZERTY without having to do a user-involved discovery process like OS X or assuming keyboard matches locality like Windows.
One could imagine that the keytops were identifiable by the keyboard, so that it could actually detect that you swapped two keys and adjust what it sends to the host based on this.
