I think Twitter patented that particular motion (pull-down-to-refresh), so either royalty payments would need to be made or a more standard refresh button would need to be added, but yes--I agree it's necessary.

I just realized I still had the beta version installed on my phone, so I deleted that and added the updated App Store version. I was hoping some of the shortcomings I've asked about had been fixed, but nope--it's still virtually unusable to me (without the go-to-first-unread-post feature) and is now cluttered with ads.