So it's not just me? I thought I must be doing something wrong between all these people talking about using their iPads as their main work machines and then text selection just doesn't work for me most of the time.

I really wonder what's going on here.

That is nuts. I had no idea such a basic feature was so broken on the iPhone.

Pretty horrible indeed, though limited mostly to Safari (which incidentally is one of the places you want to use it more often than in others in my experience)

I just tried the 7+'s text selection and it works great unlike in that video.