We're unable to programmatically get report data via the API. Is this by design? If so, why? If not, how can we pull the data from the reports we designed within Salesforce for access by other systems?

We can get a list of reports, and the column names for a given report, but not the actual report data. This seems really odd.

Right now we're looking at "Salesforce to SQL" synchronization tools, but that's a very inelegant solution. Is that the way Salesforce wants its users to do this kind of thing?

Thanks!