That caught my eye as an excuse of the super enterprise-y. I don't recall the page they put up after Steve Jobs passed away taking quite near that long.
But yeah this is some Grade-A bullshit. Either that or Apple is worse at the web than I thought (which is pretty bad considering iTunes Connect).
I believe it's done for two reasons.
1). Suspense during their events 2). To keep people from buying the older devices that they are about to discontinue. No reason to have to field support calls for people wanting to cancel/return their newly purchased items.
I guess the ridiculousness of this excuse is that the page already exists and would simply (I would think) be a matter of changing the page text. I wouldn't think this would require intensive site-wide testing, but I've been wrong on these thigns before.