Can anyone tell me why iPad keyboard has no cursor movement keys?
It's probably just a matter of the space available, and a perception that there wouldn't be any advantage to the functionality since it's a touch screen and you can do the same thing you'd do with cursor keys just by moving the image around.
The ASCII codes are in there, though, and it would be easy to implement in any application that you are using (if the programmer put it in there), or in a future version of the firmware. When I am using my iPad to access a remote virtual machine, the keyboard that I see has access to everything that you would have on a full size keyboard, but you have to use a right arrow or left arrow to get to the extra keys.
The only reason I would have to use a cursor key is because the remote virtual machine is using an operating system without hands-on-screen scrolling, like the limited functionality provided by Windows and Linux. And we're usually only going to be doing this in situations that are absolutely essential because the iPad's 1024x768 resolution doesn't leave a lot of room to see what you are doing when the keyboard pops up and takes up most of the screen.
I do it all the time, but it's not exactly fun and I can't imagine the typical user of an iPad wanting to do this.
What exactly are you doing that you want the on screen keyboard to have cursors? Even with very big emails, I quickly got used to just touching the screen to do what I want.
Are you relatively new to the iPad, and coming to it from decades of Windows use, like me?