For whatever reason IBM in their wisdom decided the AT keyboard should move Ctrl from next to A to where it is now. And I guess since that's when PC clones really started to pick up steam and decided to copy the most recent keyboard it got entrenched. And when Apple decided to bring the control key back to the Mac I guess it made some sense to copy what the PCs were doing and also not mess with previous Mac user's keyboard skills?

Japanese keyboards have extra keys near space. It's possible with software to remap those keys to something else like Ctrl. Really wish more keyboards had usable thumb keys...