It still seems rather clunky to me. I can do so many things I'll never need to do by right clicking, it seems like a Go To > Artist, Album, etc. kind of menu would have made sense. Or that maybe I was missing a hidden shortcut somewhere.
I agree with you that this would be nice to have, and I've certainly found myself in the same situation and clunked through a few of these different steps to get to the entire album. I'm fine with iTunes in most respects, but I often feel like it takes me a few more steps to get to where I feel like I want to go than I would expect. Usually I just decide that it's actually a pretty hard bit of software to design to meet all of these different expectations, that the choices they've made are probably as good as any other, and that I just need to adapt my habits to match.
That being said, listening to single albums turns out to be one of the things that doesn't seem natural if you don't come at it from the right starting place. If this is the kind of thing that you tend to do, I think that using the 'grid view' is probably the best thing for you to do, as one of the other posters suggested. Rather than switching to grid view after searching, though, I'd just switch to operating in grid view by default. Searching for individual songs works fine from there, and then all you'd do to get to the whole album is cancel the search once you've moved into the album.
Now on a completely separate note, if someone can explain to me why switching to coverflow from my iphone while I'm in a playlist shows me all of the music on my phone rather than just the album covers from my playlist, I'd be interested in hearing it...
