I just made my second submission to the WordPress Core Trac with the summary above. Here is a link to the new ticket #16868 … and here is the description:

The premise of this idea is for Theme authors to be able to add a reference to the version of WordPress their Theme requires to work correctly; and, the version of WordPress the Theme has been tested up to. This idea comes from the the plugin readme.txt file and some of the data that is expected to be found there.

Once implemented, further enhancements to the Appearance tab in the Administration Panels can be added to better inform end-users on the compatibility of the Theme with their current WordPress installation.

This is essentially an extension of my previously submitted ticket #16395 to “Add ‘Template Version’ for use with ‘Template’ in Child-Themes” I wrote about here.