It's quite common to have a number of attached objects. For example, if you use the Scatter Compound object to apply rocks to the ground, and then you collapse the scatter, you will get a single Editable Poly that contains a number of surfaces. Each surface is called an element.

Preview Selection now allows us to quickly switch between vertex, edge and face mode by hovering over the subobject in question. However, there's no easy way to also select elements, beyond manually switching into element mode. So I propose when you doubleclick a face, it will select the element the face belongs to. This would allow for very quick selection of elements without the need to switch into element mode using either a hotkey or by moving your mouse over to the command panel.

This was recently added to maya (double click selects a shell, a shell is maya's version of an element) and max having it would also be very useful.

You could also add the double click as an option in the keyboard shortcuts so that a person can assign any script to a double click action, including a script that select an element from a face.