Apple's carefully orchestrated product releases and (usually) well-secured product development lifecycles play important roles in their overall business strategy and have helped them get to where they are now.

As I said early on regarding this sample's appearance on the web, the story and details of how this all went down were probably going to be more interesting than the details revealed about the product itself. Someone else even compared the people involved to characters from a Coen brothers movie. Quite apt.