Well, if your gem didn't work with a particular combination of dependencies, that should be reflected in the version constraints. I'm not sure what an 'ideal' state is.
I'm not 100% sure if there's an official answer, exactly, but it's more representative of the state of affairs. If you do check a lockfile in, it will be ignored.
By ideal here I mean something more like known-good. A baseline of expected behavior against which I can compare. The permutations of version combinations in a typical 'production' dependency specification can get very large, and there just as much benefit to having devs start from the same working version for a library as a program.
I'm not 100% sure if there's an official answer, exactly, but it's more representative of the state of affairs. If you do check a lockfile in, it will be ignored.