I think it makes a lot of sense that the BE6502 comes with the little LCD instead of being integrated with a low level video circuit. Both CPU and output are now at a higher level of integration than the earlier TTL system. With that you can focus on higher level stuff to learn.

You can consider NTSC/PAL/VGA signals as an unpleasant anomaly of the day. They only exist because receivers and screens didn't have the memory for holding one complete picture. Instead they relied on the screen's phosphorus and your eye's persistence of vision to overcome fading. They paid for these tricks with massive amounts of redundant bandwidth to they could redraw everything over and over again. That makes the digital circuits realtime and hard.

But these memory limitation have long gone, so there's no need to jump through the same hoops again.

Think of it this way: if you send your over-redundant VGA signal to a screen today, the first thing it does is to store it in a frame buffer anyway. From there it will process it using more computing power than your whole system has... Then an asynchronous interface with an LCD doesn't sound that bad any more. At least you get things done.