extractor function for coefficient table from summary.mer ?

Request for comment: would it be reasonable to have the
"coef" method for "summary.mer" objects return the table
of parameter values, standard errors etc.?  This is parallel
to what (e.g.) coef does for summary.lm objects (in that
case by extracting the $coefficients element of the list) ...
I feel I should minimize my using of direct slot extraction
via @ ...

library(lme4)

setMethod("coef", signature(object = "summary.mer"), function(object)
object at coefs)

example(lmer)
ss <- summary(gm1)
coef(ss)

              Estimate Std. Error   z value     Pr(>|z|)
(Intercept) -1.3985351  0.2278906 -6.136871 8.416284e-10
period2     -0.9923347  0.3053852 -3.249452 1.156274e-03
period3     -1.1286754  0.3260491 -3.461673 5.368286e-04
period4     -1.5803739  0.4288037 -3.685542 2.282169e-04

Ben Bolker
Associate professor, Biology Dep't, Univ. of Florida
bolker at ufl.edu / www.zoology.ufl.edu/bolker
GPG key: www.zoology.ufl.edu/bolker/benbolker-publickey.asc