Comment 1 for bug 277526

The lack of translation of the note is probably because language packs aren't installed! Chicken and egg. language-selector is correctly listed in /etc/pkgbinarymangler/striptranslations.blacklist as one of those packages that don't occur in language packs because they need to be translated as part of the process of getting language packs onto the system; however, nobody appears to have actually pulled translations into the language-selector source package.

Bug 135752 is pretty confused now, because there have been several bugs over the lifetime of Intrepid that have variously conspired to cause problems for language pack downloading (in future, perhaps you could file new bugs rather than reopening old ones; you can always refer to the old one in case they turn out to be the same later on); however, I think those are now themselves fixed. I don't see how this is really at all relevant to your point 2, which is surely just about the fact that if you didn't have network access during installation then you don't have Packages files in /var/lib/apt/lists until you update. Note that due to bug 277302 nobody using the "Install Ubuntu" mode that doesn't involve a full desktop would have had network access during installation until today's daily build.

I think language-selector ought to offer to do an apt-get update, much like update-manager can. I don't see a particularly sensible mechanism for the installer to queue this up behind that, and even if it did I think that would be unsatisfactory for users who would have an untranslated system until the first automatic daily apt-get update (by which point they might already have got confused and given up).