If the protocol demanded strictly-increasing timestamps, what should you do if a block shows up whose timestamp is one minute ahead of what you think the time is? Should you stop mining for a minute? Should you mine blocks with a timestamp you believe is wrong?
Because it is important that the network as a whole agree on whether a block is valid, it doesn't make sense to insist on monotonically increasing timestamps.
There is a hardcoded limit implemented right now, 2 hours. So what would be the difference between 2 hours and 1 minute? In both cases it is a clear cut. Either the block is declared valid or not valid. So today the current question is
"what should you do if a block shows up whose timestamp is 2 hours and one minute ahead of what you think the time is? Should you stop mining for a minute? Should you mine blocks with a timestamp you believe is wrong?" Looking at the current code, it is clear that this block would just be invalid.
Now even if this would be 20 years ago, I would say 2 hours is way too much. I think it would take years for an average real time clock to accumulate a clock drift of 2 hours. So I guess, the only reason we still have 2 hours is that some pool operator(s?) like to play with the timestamps - I highly doubt that anyone else mining is not using the correct time:
Well, there is some bleeding edge new technology called NTP. Oops, we have this since well before '85.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol But of course using NTP would force us to have some online connection (aka internet) maybe once a day to correct the time drift of the built-in real time clock. Wait, Bitcoin needs an online connection anyway, so the legitimate is why does Bitcoin not use NTP?