If the system's real-time clock (RTC) is set to a wildly incorrect date then it can cause various bizarre problems which are not easy for a non-technical user to diagnose. One example is that visiting any https site in Firefox gives certificate warnings saying things like 'the certificate will not be valid until 2009-06-01'. To a technically savvy person, this is an obvious clue to check the system's date, but for ordinary users it's a bit mystifying. Other symptoms, such as incorrect 'received at' ordering of messages in Evolution, are equally puzzling. I suggest adding a sanity check of the system date, either at installation time, or better still at boot time or login time. As a rule of thumb, if the system clock is much earlier than the date of the Fedora release, pop up a dialogue box reporting the system's current date and time and give the option to change it. This would prevent a lot of headscratching on systems with wonky RTCs, or where some user has set the date incorrectly.
System-config-date is the wrong component for this, changing component to initscripts.
The date is part of the panel; this should be a reasonably obvious clue for non-technical users.