SmartObject.Properties will only hold strings. Am I missing something?

The SmartObject class has a 'Properties' member which is an indexed collection of SmartProperty instances. Today I discovered that SmartProperty.Value is actually of type string, and not an object as I expected. I find this a bit bewildering - does this mean that all my non-string data fields have to be converted to and from strings if I am going to use the K2 object model rather than using an ADO.NET oriented approach?