Bottom has to be a member of every type because functions aren't guaranteed to terminate, so there's no really any way around that within the confines of a general purpose programming language.

That admittedly doesn't entail that Haskell ought to have special functions like 'error' that invite the programmer to explicitly introduce bottom values as a mechanism of signaling errors. However, in the real world, executing any function may raise an exceptional condition at any time (e.g. an out of memory error), regardless of programming language.