Touch interfaces have an inherent disadvantage here — there's no equivalent of 'hovering' a 'cursor' over something to see if it changes visually, triggers a tooltip, etc. Their interfaces actually need more help to be discoverable, not less.

Swiping isn't even a great gesture for most uses. Earlier today, I had to delete maybe 50-100 downloaded podcasts from the Podcasts app (there is seemingly no way to do this en masse). The quickest way to do so is with repeated swipes, but it's almost impossible to be consistent with your swipes over 50-100 items: sometimes the swipes 'stop short', sometimes they just fail for no obvious reason. A swipe is also a LOT more physical effort than a tap — if I could have just pressed a "DELETE" button 50 times, it would have been a lot more palatable (still short of a proper multi-delete, of course).

It drives me up the walls when some kind of list or collection touch UI doesn't offer any kind of batching, and most don't.

Some kind of data-selection mode where I can drag across all the elements I want to select would be awesome.