e.g. in the UK sole traders (that is, unincorporated businesses) can't
get EV certs because the UK doesn't maintain a trade register of such
businesses

Sole traders can just trade under their own name, or their email address, or their domain name, heck even their telephone number if someone sets up an SMS verifying CA. I don't worry too much about such things - the point of the cert is just to disambiguate the payment so people can't get confused into paying the wrong entity.

Companies that can't get EV certs cause us pain indirectly by making users less certain about what they're expecting to see when they pay a company, making confusion attacks a bit easier, but I bet it'll be a minor issue in practice.