The weirder part to me was that the iPad didn't bring much improvement on that front. Even with a bigger screen and "desktop class" application, text editing only barely works with a keyboard/touchpad attached. The only improvement has been on moving the text cursor, yet it's still a real pain to select random text in the middle of a page.
On the solution though .... I think we should really do something simpler than introduce new paradigms and further dig the "that's how we do it on mobile" well.
Just give people damn arrow keys and a crontrol key: let them put a cursor on the middle of the text they want, move the cursor with ultimate precision exactly where they want it, and shift select the text they need.
Android does the arrow part right, Windows' on screen keyboard does both right. It's incredible how liberating it is to just select text with the arrow keys, hit ctrl+C, crl+V it elsewhere and be done. That's really not that much to ask, Apple not doing anything in this front feels like sheer laziness at this point.