Excellent! Thinking on it a little more, I realise that there’s an intuitive leap to be made that you are required to apply a ceiling function in the first place.
In case it’s at all helpful, here’s more detail on my thought process than you probably want:
I suspect the initial confusion is mostly rooted in unfamiliarity with the UI and how beeminder displays everything - as a newbee I’ve had to take a fair bit of time to understand the many numbers and graph-bits, and to figure out what’s important and what isn’t right now.
Bearing this unfamiliarity in mind, it’s easy to feel a distinct lack of threat from numbers like “0.067 due by Jan 28”, which one of my goals is currently displaying. It’s a small number which fades into the background of ‘lots of new information’.
I know it means I have to do 1 by that day, as there’s no other option, but 0.067 has little power to motivate me by itself - particularly since it doesn’t have any real-world analogue, so I have to remember to apply the ceiling function.
And the first couple of times I looked at it I misunderstood what it was trying to tell me and thought “Well, if I have to do 0.067 by then, when do I have to have actually submitted the first one?”, and nearly came to the forum looking for where the ‘real’ deadline was displayed.
Now I’ve thought it all through I won’t have any trouble realising that I’m due on that date, no matter what the number is, but that just means the unintuitiveness of that number not corresponding to anything in the real world will eventually become as invisible for me as it is now for you 
Hope that helps get insight into the beginner’s mind.