That proposal video was hilarious - could that guy talk any faster? 😀
They DO have an (almost) perfect implementation of copy & paste presented here. The press and hold method (for links, tables, etc.) is so ridiculously simple yet obvious, it's a sheer wonder that hasn't been incorporated already. While it wouldn't be a FULL implementation of c&p, it would have at least have been enough for people to get by with for now, and would have meant considerable less whining (well, ok...maybe not -- but at least people would have had more options). The "edit" keyboard is also a genius idea, though where would you squeeze the button for it on the standard keyboard? Or would it automatically pop up when needed? Don't forget, when you have international keyboards and other stuff clicked on, that more of the keyboard real estate is taken up with extra buttons -- so an "edit" keyboard button might have nowhere to go!
The major problem I think is still the text selection. Depending on how much text you have to select, and where it's coming from, and how the page you're selecting from is formatted, will determine how easy/difficult it ultimately is. In the example shown in the video, it looks pretty simple. But you have to realize most people won't be able to select text that easily. For example, when copying text from a Safari page, most users will probably blow the page up as big as possible first, in order to get the starting point of the selection as accurate as possible. But once they do that, if the area to be selected is too large, and goes beyond the edge of the viewable screen, what happens then? Will it scroll along as you move the magnifying cursor along? In cases like this, you will be trying to select big portions of text, when the majority of it is not even viewable. People might try and pinch the page some more, scaling it appropriately in order to get a better view of the whole text to be selected -- but the more you pinch, the less you can easily tell what you're selecting. It's a messy, not-quite-perfect solution -- and I just don't know if Apple will go for it.
