UIScrollView
handles touches in a slightly unusual way. From the class reference:
Because a scroll view has no scroll bars, it must know whether a touch signals an intent to scroll versus an intent to track a subview in the content. To make this determination, it temporarily intercepts a touch-down event by starting a timer and, before the timer fires, seeing if the touching finger makes any movement. If the timer fires without a significant change in position, the scroll view sends tracking events to the touched subview of the content view. If the user then drags their finger far enough before the timer elapses, the scroll view cancels any tracking in the subview and performs the scrolling itself...
A subview within the scroll view's content view will eventually receive non-scrolling touches to the scroll view.
A superview of a scroll view is unlikely to see touch events as its -hitTest:withEvent:
will return the scroll view so touch events will be sent to the scroll view which is not required to forward them back up the responder chain to the parent view.
First responder does not influence the delivery of touch events, see http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/EventHandling/Conceptual/EventHandlingiPhoneOS/EventsiPhoneOS/EventsiPhoneOS.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009541-CH2-SW5
The first responder is the responder object in an application (usually a UIView object) that is designated to be the first recipient of events other than touch events...