Why can't deleted Google accounts be recovered?

There should be a grace period of at least 24 hours before an account is truly deleted, to allow people to recover accounts that were maliciously or accidentally deleted.

I just tried to delete my secondary Google Account (used for Groups only) and I had Gmail open in another tab. Both of them have the same username, just one is @gmail.com and the other is with another provider. I signed into the secondary account and then went to the delete my account page. It just showed the first part of the username, not the entire email address, so of course, I thought it was deleteing the secondary account that I just signed into. As it turns out, I just erased my entire primary Google account with my email, contacts, documents and everything. It really, really sucks.

I know I made a mistake and should have triple checked somehow (although I don't know how I would have done this, since it didn't show the full email address on the delete page), but there should be some way to recover a deleted account. Even a five-minute grace period would have saved me this pain. Why!? Why!?