Drew, you heard right - Cheryl mentioned this during the Customer Engagement webinar this week. There are Ideas for this that were submitted as far back as 2010 and 2011 (Multi-Select Emails in the Tree, Multi-select Campaigns/Emails to Move,Multi-Select Objects). It's too bad that it takes so long to implement some of these seemingly basic good Ideas, but the good news is they are being added - like Forms 2.0!
As you may have noticed, we are working on a full UI upgrade of the Lead Management app. Part of the upgrade will include a new Tree that will be a split tree. This should help with tree performance and asset management. And with this, we will get the ability to multiselect items in the tree. Plan is to have this in before the end of 2013.