I'm not 100% sure, but I believe it worked as expected in previous versions of Maemo (770/N8x0). You could press and hold, then lift your finger (while the menu remained visible), then select.

If this is true. it means that whoever designed this behaviour for Maemo 5 did it on purpose. It still annoys me even though I had more than a year to get used to it. It's just too stupid. I would like to ... you know.... do things to the person responsible for this.