Julia devs are working hard trying to make a language than is consistent and elegant, they don't want to add functions in Base only because they are convenient for people coming from a particular background when there's a more "Julian" way of doing it. Plus if you start adding matlab's function, why stop there? Add also R and python ones, you see it's not really a practical solution.
The solution is to put all these in the matlabcompat package, so that people that are familiar with matlab can have all the familiar tools they need (meshgrid, interp1, polyfit, ...) without having to find, install and read the docs of 10 different packages. Since these functions are relatively simple, I'd encourage you to contribute to that package.
