I installed rEFIt v0.11 using the package install (not manual install) on my original Macbook Pro.
The resulting boot menu shows my Leopard, Ubuntu and Windows volumes as well as the partition sync, about rEFIt, restart and shutdown options. But no shell option.
I went into refit.conf and make sure that the disable, hidebadges, and hideui lines were all set to none, but still no shell option.
I know the refit.conf is being processed because the legacyfirst option is working.
Do you happen to have the Mac OS X partition formatted as "Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive)"? If yes, that might be because of a mismatch between the file name shell.efi is installed by the package and what rEFIt expects when scanning for it. This has been fixed in the 0.13 release, so updating might fix the problem for you.