And noise itself is actually "measurement error" at the receiver, which is rarely Gaussian, in fact it really is quite predictable and/or removable.
Noise in the Shannon sense is random and therefore not predictable or correlated. Interference can be both predictable and correlated, and therefore can sometimes be removed / to an extent. Modelling interference as noise means not exploiting its inherent properties, and yes that means ending lower capacity.
"ending up with lower capacity"
--**************************************************************** Dr. Ulrich Speidel School of Computer Science Room 303S.594 (City Campus) The University of Auckland u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/ ****************************************************************