In my opinion, it's perfectly ok to use the dinner fork to eat your salad rather than using the salad fork to eat your salad.
Nikon and Canon own 75% of the dSLR camera market. The remaining 25% of the market is shared by all the other dSLR camera makers, Pentax, Fuji, Sigma, Olympus, Panasonic, Sony, and the rest.
Sony uses a unique, non-ISO standard hot shoe. All the other camera makers use the standard ISO 518:2006 hot shoe. In sony's defense, they inherited the odd-ball hot shoe when they bought Konica-Minolta's camera business.