I use an iPhone daily and there have only been a few times I've missed copy and paste. Usually it's been when I'm tapping out a reply email or posting on a site such as YC News and need to quote someone. To route around the lack of copy and paste my replies end up being similar to using a word you know how to spell instead of one you don't; I just write what I think rather than writing about what someone else has written and think nothing of it. There are certainly cases when this analogy doesn't hold and copy and paste functionality would be nice, but it's definitely by design that there isn't one.

Constraining developers and themselves to create simpler ways to do things is smart of Apple. Emailing photos is the perfect example: I want to email this photo that is on my screen -- not open my "photo application", copy a photo, go back to the main screen, open my "email application" and paste the photo. Most of the copy and paste scenarios can be handled in a similar way: links to maps, links to phone numbers, links to URLs, and so on.

Maybe there are better ways to perform actions on mobile platforms instead of following the decades-old clunky mouse way to do them?