> Bring back deep presses, which isn't very discoverable, but it's memorable once you get used to it.

Apple does this with many gestures already. Double tap to select a word for example. I think bringing back deep press would be a great move, and agree with everything else you've said here on that.

> 2. Allow touching with two fingers. If they're next to each other, immediately position the cursor.

Long press will put the cursor where your finger is, and will give you a magnified bubble for finer selection (did you really mean to select before or after the hyphen?)

> Spread them and the selection widen ... Pinch on a selection to...

these pinch style gestures would be unusable on a 5" screen I think, and incredibly fiddly even on a 10.1" iPad screen. I work in games, and even though our controllers can handle multiple inputs, we generally tend to avoid chorded inputs because the average person's dexterity is not as good as you would think.