Rolf, apart from the Fortan angle, may I strongly encourage that we adopt this datatype for MPI-4. It is part of real MPI codes already, but now we have to fake transfer datatypes as 16-bit integers or bytes... which means not really right if heterogeneous interoperability were to be maintained. And this is a canonical IEEE type now, as you note. There is also the "2 half-float" datatype (32-bits) at least in CUDA to be looked at; maybe ignored or maybe supported, but it is there too. Key to this MPI users and applications use half floats and 2 half-floats :-) in practice.
May I also suggest a forward look at the types in AVX-512, in case any of these become particularly relevant in future.