I believe Apple (maybe Steve Jobs himself?) acknowledged the omission at the time and said they would add it once they had a design and implementation that work

I believe Apple (maybe Steve Jobs himself?) acknowledged the omission at the time and said they would add it once they had a design and implementation that worked well. Long and short taps were certainly on the table since they were used in previous mobile/touch platforms including Apple's own Newton. The loupe wasn't great; eventually they went to the current method of dragging the insertion pointer, which seems to work better.