You can't use empty buckets to pick up water in the beta unless you're trying to get it from a water logged block (In that case it works), but in general you can't just pick up water with a bucket in creative or survival.
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is duplicated by 8
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I think i found the reason for the bug: buckets are giving less priority to water and more priority to blocks behind/under the water. Thus when we try to pick watee/lava, the bucket doesn't see the water/lava, it rather sees the background block. Also, buckets do seem to pick water/lava when there are no blocks in range of the player other than the water/lava source block. I've attached a video observation of the same..
Confirmed - this affects touch screen controls (but not split-touch). It's impossible to pick up water or lava unless there is a water logged block present in the source block.