yeah, "the madman" has a point, once in a while
. as pentaxpoke explained. the point is, summing it up, that it is pointless and misleading to give these figures for 50mm lens on aps-c cameras, just because it happened to be common practice for 35mm film slrs (for obvious reasons), and thus it is pointless to compare these figures between different formats (medium format vs aps-c, or aps-c vs 35mm film). it is debatable if camera manufacturers should use the "normal" focal length for all formats, not whatever suiths the marketing department (hmm, i guess it's obvious what my opinion on this is), as things are now, again, these figures are only useful for comparing cameras of the same format.
edit: this means you cannot compare directly 35mm, aps-c, canon entry, canon almost-35mm-dslr, and four thirds, so, for most intents and purposes, it's bloody wrong.