This is very right.
I identify the lack of "copy" an actual problem in X design. Many people are used to the idea that when they select something, it's immediately and implicitly copied somewhere into clipboard.
So, say, you select a piece of text in an xterm, then thinking your selection has now been "copied", you close the app and try to paste in any window.
Nothing happens. The process holding the selection has exitted, and thus the paste is not possible, because the selection owner can not be contacted.
Another major annoyance for me is that all the scandinavian letters like ń and ÷ can not be pasted into any *emacs I have. I often try to cut-paste something from, say, xterm or browser, and I know this used to work, but nowadays I get all my pastes full of stuff like ^[%/1^└^╬ISO8859-15^B around every scandinavian char. WHY!?
The XEmacs multilingual environment stuff seems also hopelessly broken. I had a mule version of xemacs installed and it semi-randomly prompted me for coding system to use for storing my iso-8859-1 files with absolutely nothing but standard scandinavian chars inside them, and typically *refused* to save the file as "iso-8859-1" insisting on using "iso-8859-1-with-esc" instead.
Naturally, all the scandinavian letters were broken after reloading the file into emacs. Thankfully, the less featured nomule versions work except for the cut-paste problem.