[Ken Case]

Woops! Sorry, yes, this bug was caused by an accident of development timing: I originally introduced the ContextModeShowsParents setting on the Mac and iPhone (on 2010-01-21) and started out with it off by default so it matched the old behavior. A few weeks later I turned it on by default on the Mac and iPhone.

But what I missed was that we'd created the new iPad app just a few days earlier, copying that default "off" setting into the iPad app's default settings. If you update your setting on a Mac it gets copied around, and you get consistent behavior—which is why I've never noticed this myself—but if you've never changed the setting, you'll end up with inconsistent results between the iPad and the other editions.

I just filed a bug against the iPad app along with a quick patch to fix the issue.