Hyper-V isn't late to the party at all, it's been out for 2 years already. Unfortunately, for some idiotic reason they decided not to enable Hyper-V support in the desktop client OS.
At the time, the team's #1 priority was to make a product that is competitive to VMWare on the enterprise level. Therea re additional issues and overhead associated with porting Hyper-V to the client SKU's. And they simply did not have the time or the resource to do so.
Now, they are able to bring Hyper-V to Win8 (the client SKUs) since they have a bigger team and more resources at their disposal.
Selling more costly licenses is not idiotic from their point-of-view.