The main reason is that, in order to do this you really need a high-speed random access device. Tape drives are neither high speed (at least not the speed you really need) nor are they random access (they are sequential access).
Perhaps someone has written a tape driver that will end up calling me a liar on this point, but in general, tape is not the right hardware paradigm to start with to make a good file system.
I have seen such a thing - a friend of mine (Gary Howland, sadly deceased) wrote such a driver. It worked well enough to play Doom off it. :)
You see? In the world of Linux, I am loathe these days to ever say that something doesn't exist or can't exist -- someone out there has probably already written it. :-)
This was many years ago and was DOS only - as I recall he made a meta index at the front of the tape which allowed to to seek directly to the block where the required file was located.
This is (more or less) how Unix "dump" format tapes work too -- table of contents at the head of the tape. This is a special format geared to be able to do this. I was answering the general question of whether one could "mount" any arbitrary tape as a file system. Programs that use formats like the unix "dump" format and probably the one that does the same for DOS, use memory as a cache for the pieces that really need to be more random access for any kind of performance.
And no, I'm not calling you a liar.
Whew! :-)
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