From Apple's iOS 5.1 SDK release notes:
In 5.1 the UISplitViewController class adopts the sliding presentation
  style when presenting the left view (previously only seen in Mail).
  This style is used when presentation is initiated either by the
  existing bar button item provided by the delegate methods or by a
  swipe gesture within the right view. No additional API adoption is
  required to obtain this behavior, and all existing API, including that
  of the UIPopoverController instance provided by the delegate, will
  continue to work as before. If the gesture cannot be supported in your
  app, set the presentsWithGesture property of your split view
  controller to NO to disable the gesture. However, disabling the
  gesture is discouraged because its use preserves a consistent user
  experience across all applications.
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UPDATE:
From what I understand on the above, we can kiss the automatic popover appearance of the master controller goodbye in iOS 5.1.
The only way I see is possible to keep the "old" appearance, is by implementing our own UIPopoverController and taking advantage of the ShouldHideViewController delegate method. Thankfully with MonoTouch, we have that method available as a property in the UISplitViewController class, making things a bit simpler. 
I do get a strange behavior though. With iOS SDK 5.1 on my Mac and iOS 5.1 on my iPad; on the device, I get the "sliding" appearance, while on the simulator I get the "old", popover appearance. This is with MonoTouch 5.2.4, which is the latest stable version. Also, it does not contain a PresentsWithGesture property. I tried setting its value to false through MonoTouch.ObjCRuntime messaging, but no luck. The selector keeps returning true. So I cannot deactivate the swipe gesture.
Even tried creating my own UIPopoverController and assigning it as the master in the split controller to see what happens. Doesn't work because UIPopoverController is not a UIViewController...
Some useful info in this question, for ObjC.