Couldn't agree more, My last IOS device was the Iphone 3G, so I kind of lost touch with IOS. Recently found myself trying to help my mom print an email on her Ipad, and felt quiet disarmed as none of those icons made any sense at all! Ended up clicking icons to see what happens, one in particular, was apparently deleting messages, and I have yet to understand what the icon symbol was all about :P
Perhaps it was an older version.
iOS's heavy reliance on this gesture is a great example of how bad it's gotten. Unlike drawers, which usually have some kind of pullable tab, or reorderable items in a list, which have little icons indicating grabbable-ness, there is no visual cue that items can be swiped left. If you've never used iOS before, you have no way to delete important things unless you've been instructed how to from friends or iPhone-using ancestors.