Possible that commandButton is firing the Action event, which causes blockUIOnSubmit to block, which prevents the subsequent submit for the rowSelection from occurring ?

The dataTable component wires up a 'onclick' event handler that eventually invokes iceSubmitPartial() function to inform the server about the newly selected row. When a commandButton or commandLink is used the 'onclick' event handlers of these components already invoke the iceSubmit() function. Because the blockUIOnSubmit feature blocks any subsequent requests from occurring the 'onclick' event handler wired to the table never gets a chance to send the new row position.

The inputText components does work well because there's no 'onclick' event handler registered with the 'input' element. The 'click' event bubbles up to the table element which submits the new row position.

Resolving this issue within the components themselves would require a very large amount of effort and complexity/risk due to the nature of how these features must be implemented in the browser. Since a reasonable workaround is available, marking this as Won't Fix.