> Maybe it'd be nice if the calibration data could be sent from the OS to be applied directly on the monitor instead of the Video Card?

That would not be nice.

When you "calibrate" a monitor, you're really creating an output profile... a record of what signals create which colors. You can also calibrate a camera, and get an input profile, which is a record of which colors create what signals.

If you display a picture on-screen with a color profile, and your monitor has a color profile, the software translates the image from the image's color profile to the monitor's profile, and displays that on-screen. The problem here is that different pictures on screen will have different profiles, so you can't just load a profile into the monitor and do the conversion there.

For example, you might open a website, and see a bunch of pictures with sRGB profiles. And then you might open another website, and see pictures with Adobe RGB, which covers a wider gamut. The Adobe RGB profile pictures can be more colorful, if your monitor supports it, but both sets of pictures can be on-screen at the same time. Then there's the different ways you convert from one profile to another, depending on what you want (perceptual, relative colorimetric, absolute colorimetric).

I do mind telemetry, especially on something as private as my display (or keyboard).

Realistically, why does it matter what the exact mechanism of applying calibration data is? As long as it works with the appropriate .ICM file, I'm happy. Or, (sounds crazy) just have monitors introduce a setting that treats the video input as a dumb, uncalibrated RGB stream and do the colour mapping internally in the monitor.