R annoyances

Dear R Folks,
I'm a big fan of R, but there are a couple of things
that repeatedly annoy me, and I wondered if anyone
has neat ways to deal with them.

(a) When using "apply" row-wise to a matrix, it returns
    the results column-wise, and to preserve the original
    orientation, I've to do a transpose. E.g. I've to keep
    doing a transpose, which I consider to be quite annoying.
	
    transformed.mtx <- t(apply( mtx, 1, exp))

(b) When extracting 2 or more columns of a matrix, 
    R returns the result as a matrix, BUT when extracting
    just one column, it returns a vector/array, rather than
    a matrix, so I've to keep doing as.matrix, which is annoying.

	sub.mtx <- as.matrix(mtx[,1])

	Of course I could write a suitable function
		cols <- function(mtx,range) as.matrix(mtx[, range])
	but then I lose the syntactic sugar of being able to say "[,1]".