.. that is the way the chip is designed.

there is good reasons, the port pin and the port latch are not identical in cases where a pin is set high and held low (input).

if you need the port latch access, use a shadow register
instead of
mov p1,xxx
do
mov p1shadow,xxx
mov p1,p1shadow

that makes no sense for writes, but if you need to read the latch, reading the shadow will do the trick

Erik