It's Official
I got a follow-up email to my bug report to Apple regarding the iTunes 7.7.1 "whose clause" to-do: "Engineering is no longer able to reproduce the issue with iTunes 8." The iTunes guys put things back the way they were, more or less. An implied list (using "every" as the specifier or a range) returns a list or empty list, an implied single entity specifier ("first", "last", "some", and so on) returns a bare value.