Well, if you have prerendered pictures, of course it would. But how hard could it be to just make a text overlay, rendered on the fly?
Turns out: extraordinarily hard.
In my mind it shouldn't be, since in every instance where they used a picture to represent a key, there was text immediately following or preceeding it. You might be thinking of dialogue text floating above a character's head in point-and-click games, but in Skyrim the text never follows anything around the screen. It always stays in the middle, or gets stuck in a predetermined spot in the inventory screen and so on. And like I said, text was already being placed there anyway, so what's the pain? It's just form before function, since PC gamers aren't picky about how keys are represented anyway; lots of games have used a simple "Press [Space] to jump" prompt. No biggie.
But yeah, Skyrim's controls were not ported over well. I and many others got stuck the first time we opened a container and couldn't close it again.
> Press E to open.
> Press E to close (doesn't work).
> Press Esc to close (doesn't work).
> Press Space to close (doesn't work).
> Mash buttons on keyboard.
> Finally discover that Tab closes containers. TAB, REALLY?!