Yeah, I would. PrettyKitty and Samesong (except for the です thing) together kindof mentioned the stuff I edited out. I feel it's accurate, but decided it's a little misleading, since it seems to be the only way a lot of textbooks go over the form, to the extent that for around a month after I learned it I didn't think you could use it without が. But in actuality it seems to be used exactly like any other verb except for the optional (if frequent) が swap. (for 食べたい alone, google hits が twice as often as を. Of course, some of the がs are marking the eater, but it's still indicative. を still gets over 2 million though, so it's obviously fairly standard as well).
So I decided I didn't want to get too far into it, largely because I don't really understand, with my grasp of grammar holistically,
why you could use を or が here and still essentially mean the same thing. I've actually come to think of it as similar to the modern passive, in that you can say either りんごを食べられました or りんごが食べられました. The first has something other than the apple as it's (generally unspoken) subject, and that subject is actually receiving the action instead of the apple. Known as the Suffering Passive, IE "I suffered the apple being eaten." The eating was done to you, but it's the apple that was actually eaten. Meanwhile the second is a more straightforwardly passive of the English variety, simply saying "The apple was eaten," nothing else implied. The second has supposedly(?) only become acceptable in modern times (possibly due to English). I think of たい as being somewhat similar (in a very general way, not specifically), though I kind of imagine that with たい, the が was originally what you used (since it's a bloody adjective), but that perhaps を has come to be acceptable over time. It could just as easily be the other way around or have always been this way, though - I'm blissfully unaware. Either way, I'd say が shows it is desirable to someone (which I suppose makes the statement stronger), while を states that someone desires it. Edit: Or alternatively, in the same way you can say that in を食べられる, the apple is getting 食べ'd and you're getting られる'd, in を食べたい, the apple is getting the 食べ but you're getting the たい (I mean as far as emphasis and breakdown, the sentence is obviously not passive). While in が食べられる the apple is getting the whole thing, as it is in が食べたい, which makes it much more emphatic. Hahaha, this is such bullshit.
This isn't a solid grammatical opinion,
obviously. It's just how everything has come to settle in my head over time. So it's specifically inaccurate, in much the same way that anything I say about English is specifically inaccurate, but I believe it's broadly applicable.
Now, see, dangit, this is exactly the sort of post I was trying to avoid!
Tobberoth: It's entirely unimportant, since it's really just naming convention, but the copula genuinely isn't a verb in Japanese. It's just the copula. It is usable to form a predicate, but predicate doesn't equal verb (and an adjective may also be a predicate in Japanese). I'd reference to something specific, but you can pretty much just type 'japanese copula predicate' in google and go click happy.
Edited: 2008-11-14, 8:31 am
Although I understand this one as well.