Can't access iphone Photo Album

Photos in your iPhone's Camera Roll are photos that were captured by your computer, or a photo saved from a received email, from a website, or from a received MMS.

Photos in your iPhone's Photo Library - other than the Camera Roll are photos that were transferred from your computer, and these photos should remain on your computer. The transfer process for these photos is a one way transfer process only - from your computer to your iPhone.

There are some 3rd party paid utilities that provide for transferring these photos in the opposite direction, but such utilities are not supported by Apple.

Photos transferred from your computer are optimized for viewing on your iPhone as part of the iTunes sync/transfer process - the original resolution of these photos is reduced on your iPhone.

The ability to import photos from the 'camera roll' album on my iphone to iphoto seems to have been lost since upgrading to ios4.0.2. Options exist to share selected pictures via email, MMS or sending to mobile me. Also selected pictures can be 'copied', but what do you do with them then (max 3) apart from paste into an email.
On iphoto (and itunes) on my macbook pro it shows the iphone as attached but on iphoto it just says the iphone has 'no items'. Not so, there are about 400 photos on the camera roll now and these can be brought up normally on the iphone. I have tried latest iphone & iphoto updates but no improvement.
Have apple deliberately removed this auto import from the iphone 4 software to force you to send images via a cellular data network?
Confused.
Thanks for any input.
Nigel K