This really depends on the situation: imagine something as classic as a birthday selector, what would you use for a year selection? The only applicable alternative is a slider control, but such a slider with a 100+ values might be very hard to use with the needed precision. Another common example would be a list of countries (or any long list of words actually), you can't use a slider there, it would be very counter-intuitive, and all other alternative controls would take too much space.
Depending on the length of the list, if you need to encourage correct spelling and have a list where the user knows the answer without needing to look at all the options (eg a country) then typeahead (autocomplete) functionality can work well here.
Any problem with simply typing the information? It doesn't seem like it's that hard to type. A year selector just so someone can type four digits seems superfluous.
There are people who are not using A.D. as their calendar year. In this case, it's much less confusing to have a drop down.
If the site is primarily US or EU-based, there won't be much of a problem, but in SEA this is rather problematic since the people usually use their local calendar year when talking about birthday. (For example, in Thailand nobody says "I born in 1986", instead most of us says "I born in 2529".)
(And B.E. is confusing as it is, since there are difference in interpretion between countries, some has year zero and some do not.)
I see country drop downs that allowed typing as well to selection. Usually it's some Javascript UI widget that does progressive enhancement, but it is available.
