If you have an object in the F-Curve item tree, and animated a material, in my case emit, and you have the F-Curve selected, collapse the Object by clicking the triangle and select the emit Curve from the next material, the old one stays selected, the new one is highlighted, but not selected. You can´t select any other F-Curve until you expand the old Object again, then select another Curve and then you can collapse it.
Is this intentional for some reason or simply a bug?
I believe this is a feature. Clicking on the property HILIGHTS the curve so you can find it amongst all the other curves, all the while retaining whatever selection set you’ve created. If you want to select the curve, you can select a single point along the hilight (thus deselecting everything else) and then press L to select all other keyframes in that curve.
That said, I think it WOULD be nice if there were, for instance, the ability to alt+click on the property name to select all points on that curve (and shift+alt+click to add/remove from the existing selection).
I think thats rubbish if its a feature.
I spend lots of time finding the still selected attribute in the tree in a collapsed object when I want to select another one.
And I really can´t leave all expanded - I get wet eyes and panic attacks due to a complete lack of overview.
IMO the curve UI needs some improvements. I can´t point out what, but it all seems so chaotic.
I agree. One of my primary uses of groups, especially on larger projects, is to keep my animation curves manageable (I use the filter-by-group option, i.e.).
It’s a bug that has been reported & acknowledged, since it also applies to many other F-curve situations. The F-curve Editor is slated for “refactoring” according to Aligorith, but no ETA has been given afaik.
Cool, thanks.
Sometimes it´s just easier to ask than to dig in the bugtracker 
(translates I had no time or was too lazy)
I hope the revamp of the FCE will be good and they´ll ask some input, prefereable from some peeps using other apps for animating to get a productive system going.
When I enter the FCE I often ask myself who´s idea it was to make it the way as it is. But there are many things in Blender where you see the dry pragmatism of developers surface 
You should keep an eye on Aligorith’s blog: http://aligorith.blogspot.com
He’s the mastermind behind a lot of the current and upcoming changes to animation/keyframes, and he reads the comments…
The problem with Blender is, that if you keep an eye on every dev and all changes, you´re more busy reading and recompiling svn than with Blending
My browsers bookmarks are bursting already - and yeh, algorith´s in there too already (boost.python ftw)