There are few similar requests like this one, different enough to stay as separate entries — perhaps you’d like to upvote them:
1. Consistent Keyboard Shortcuts: http://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657/suggestions/39880372
2. Unify the design language of UI and UX across all Adobe products: http://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657/suggestions/34605112
3. Make Desktop and iPad versions look the same: http://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/931888/suggestions/42520507

You shouldn’t have mention the rules of the road :)
Eurotunnel is a funny thing! And when a whole country is built around certain driving rules... I don’t mean it’s no possible to change the side people drive (cases exist), it’s just never easy.

I understand your sarcasm, and I share some of the notions myself.
They apply both ways: I like some things Photoshop does better, and some things Ai nailed (and some thing both do very poorly).
But you can’t unite American English and British English back together. And Ps and Ai were never even siblings. Count them as cousins. Or better as employees in a uniform. Actually, I think metaphors makes it worse.

But people learn different languages and embrace different cultures all the time. Don’t deny us the ability to learn a new program.

Right we would not want a user to be able take control and have to re-learn how to navigate inside a new application. Why dont we also change the shortcut keys while we are at it? Better yet - Why not change the design of our rules of the road. This way drivers have to learn and adapt to the new area they are driving in. This will be a hoot. Wonder how this will work out. Sounds like pride and lack of communication is a barrier to success.

Consistency for the sake of consistency is a dangerous idea.
If you change a default behavior (either from Ai or Ps side), an army of users who know how it works will get very mad. More mad than any user can be who comes from Ps and learns how a tool in Ai works.

Despite Ps and Ai (and InD and AE) look very similar, they are very much different, come from different sources, teams, backgrounds...

Eraser in Ai works like this, probably because it follows the way Line works in Ai, or any other tool that creates a shape here.
Eraser in Ps works like this, probably because it follows the way Brush work in Ps.

Ai deals with objects.
Ps deals with pixels.

There are many requests here at UV to make Ai looks like InDesign (from those who learnt InD first), or Corel Draw (from those who came in Ai from there), or like Figma (there are pretty new in general), or anything else...
It never does get solved by mimicking... It gets solved by learning and training one’s mind.

However, requests like yours are still important — so thank you for not being silent and requesting it.
These help to make the team to be aware of the paradigms shifting and to adapt Ai to those that are important.