The reason has already been explained, but to elaborate, this is a
realistic effect, since you have no falloff to the light.  In the real
world, the light would diminish in intensity the farther from the light
source.  If you place a light close to the ground in a room, you would
get that bright spot on the ground, but the walls around it would also
be very dark.

You actually explained the effect yourself, although you may not have
understood the implications of it:

The doc. says:
A pointlight ... illuminates  everything in the scene
equally no matter how far away from the light source
it may be.

This alone doesn't take into account the incident angle of the light,
only that the light doesn't dimish over distance.  The room will be
evenly illuminated if you add brilliance 1 to your finish, but then the
shadows dissapear.

Possible solutions would be to add some fill lighting to reduce the
darkness of the floor while adding a falloff distance to the light, or
to simply place the light higher up.  Typically, people opt for more
lights in a room to fill in dark corners but to retain a natural look.

-Mike

http://members.aol.com/amaltheaj5

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