Totally believable. I don't have any insider knowledge, but I suspect that some of the iTunes team must have been busy in the past two years working on other projects. A bunch of back-end patches have been made to versions 7.x to support the new devices, but nothing much in terms of general features. I'd hardly call what's in 8.0 a heavy load of new additions either. Definitely not something they've been cooking since 7 came out.

People may want to check out Songbird if they're able to run it on their system. Seems like it's a decent music app modeled after iTunes in many ways. Open source however, so it definitely won't do Apple-ecosystem stuff like control an AppleTV. They do have iPod sync support for some models though.