Well, most of the time somebody says: "I would give my right arm for…" they don´t really mean it, do they?
Anyway I will try to be a little constructive about it tomorrow.
But thinking about it now (not at the Octo) it seems simple enough. What is interesting is what happens the moment you touch a step button. In the normal page state, step buttons toggle the step state. But we are already accustomed to the behavior when you grab a step and tweaking an attribute knob (PIT, LEN whatever): The step is in this case NOT toggled because you imediately performed an action.
So perhaps copy/paste could work in exactly the same way: You grab a step, and if CPY or PST is pressed very shortly after, there is no toggling but instead the chosen command.
In EDIT state you should have the same, but following the model of this state, the step you grab will be played in realtime as you grab it for copying it. What you additionally could do here is also make the note you paste play in realtime.