> we had better regard —after all those centuries!— zero as a most natural number

Of course, a counter argument is that we've already made the mistake of indexing with 1 in natural language (first, second, ...). That decision is not free of annoyances, though: the 19th century are year numbers 18xx, floors below the first have a varying names when they could have been negative numbers, etc.

It's like right-click-to-select.