It's important to remember that we can only do our general engineering and internal testing before things are released to the public. I've tried to discuss this in some detail on the blog, but external testing -- which expands to over 100 "real users" -- can only commence once real users have the OS version -- that is, the day of release.
On top of that, changes made to the OS between the final "developer" build and the final release are often significant, and thus you cannot responsibly release before that's in hand.
In our case, once it was in hand -- day and date when it was available to others -- we started our external tests. Issues that arose during that testing, and those that were encountered by people using 2.1.4 under Leopard, are what caused the delay. It's not Apple's "fault": it's just how things are.
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--Dave Nanian
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