I'm torn between wanting to shamelessly pander to Illustrator users or decide if doing it differently would be better enought to mitigate the inconsistancey!
Illustrator is far from being the standard. Xara, CorelDraw, Freehand, Canvas all have sizeable user communities, and as a rule they don't imitate Illustrator keybindings but do most things their own way. Besides, there's GIMP and other linux graphic soft that we must take into account. So I think in each case, we should review the existing approaches and either select one of them (not necessarily Illustrator) as the best, or devise our own.
And by the way, at least global keybindings should ultimately be user configurable (it's difficult to do that for all keybindings, but at least those in shortcuts.c must be taken from the config file).