The mouse plugin and all the interactions that build on it are scheduled for heavy rewrites for the 2.0 release. This work has started now with http://wiki.jqueryui.com/w/page/40076663/Grid-Selecting and will continue. The existing versions of all these plugins are currently not getting any but the most critical updates. The next version of what is now the mouse plugin will have mouse and touch support (so it will need a more suitable name). jQuery mobile plays into this in that it has solved a lot of the issues with touch, so we'll incorporate their solutions into ours, when we get to that point.