Turns out in Mountain Lion you can DRAG the individual reminders in the list to at least *manually* arrange them by due date, which I guess is better than nothing... 😟
I was looking at the Reminders pane in Lion's iCal and in that OS you could sort them ascending by due date, priority, title, calendar, and manually.
Also in Lion, Notes in Mail could be sorted ascending or descending by date, subject, and several other fields.
In iOS 5.1.1, Notes sorts ascending by rev. date only, and I have no idea how Reminders sorts. It's clearly NOT by title, priority, or due date and there's no option to manually arrange the individual items in the list.
I really hope both Reminders and Notes in Mountain Lion and iOS get some attention by the folks at Apple because, at least the way I use them, they are seriously falling short.