Tail recursion elimination and logical shortcut operators

It looks as tho' the current (2.3.3) Scala compiler's ability to 
eliminate tail calls is frustrated by the logical shortcut operators. 

Looking at the decompiled output, in this case,

  def foo(n : Int) : Boolean =
    n == 1 || foo(n-1)

the tail call isn't eliminated, but in the equivalent,

  def foo(n : Int) : Boolean =
    if(n == 1)
      true
    else
      foo(n-1)

it is.

Or are they equivalent? Does the definition of || as,

  def || (p: => Boolean): Boolean

carry any deeper significance which prevents the call of foo(n-1) in the 
first case being identified as a tail call (rather than merely making 
it more difficult)?

Cheers,


Miles