^x5 But I think that's cool. It's like adding a catch-word so it can be remembered easily and it may result "exotic" and attractive. Also it may got "foreigners" to get interested in Japanese
Gundan is not an attractive word however, just kinda sounds like something is caught in the back of your throat and you're trying to swallow it down "GUNdan"
(I made a very long reply to this and put it in the musings thread instead because, uh, somehow it managed to be 604 words. I get very passionate about shitty translations, okay .)
I'm half wondering if it looking like "Gundam" is part of the reason they left it that way (despite the fact that in Japanese the pronunciation is quite a ways off)