The uselessness of the USPS package tracking system

This is just a rant so feel free to ignore…
I’ve been doing some holiday purchasing on eBay over the last couple of months and I’ve been very unhappy with the quality of service the postal service has been providing. Sure, they get the packages to me in a timely manner, so they’re fulfilling that purpose just fine but there are some other customer services that they sure could improve, not the least of which is their online package tracking service. Here are a couple of problems with the service as it is:

1. It’s only updated once every 24 hours. This means that there’s a good chance that the package will show up on my door before I’m even aware that it’s going to arrive that day.
2. The system provides no information about the current location of the package. It appears as though the only purpose of the system is to let you know when the package arrived, and there’s actually no “trackingâ€? service of any kind.
3. I’ve had several instances where I get the standard “package information has been received but this doesn’t mean that the package has been shippedâ€? message even after the package has been delivered, suggesting that in some instances your package doesn’t even enter into the tracking software.

Why doesn’t the post office have an infrastructure similar to UPS, FedEx or DHL which allows them to track packages as they enter/leave a processing facility? Would it be that hard?