Table directive should support tab-delimited data, especially important since this is the format you will get if copy/pasting from an HTML table or spreadsheet (Gnumeric, OO Calc, Excel). Test case which fails:

They do work, but C-style backslash escapes aren't recognised, so the syntax delimiter="\t" (as in your test case) looks for the literal string \t. Replacing \t with a literal tab character makes it work - here's a test (I changed the data to make the table layout more obvious):

left	2
2	right
alpha	beta

So, I think this can be considered not a bug? --smcv

I've clarified the documentation. --smcv