You can try to justify it any way you like, but the reality is that delays like these are not typical.
For brand new Apple product categories they are quite typical. iPhone shipped worldwide in first couple of months? Not. iPad? Not.
Apple much as Apple is tap dancing that this is just a continuation of the old Mac Pro, it really isn't It has substantial overlap but the targeted demographics and functionality are substantively different.
It suggests to me that something may have gone wrong somewhere. Some of their earlier Mac Pros were available in their stores within a week of them being released.
Earlier Mac Pros were not effectively new products ( intial 2006 transition but exceptional in the CPU transition aspects). Those earlier Mac Pros were not "introduced and hinted at 4 different times ( "something in 2013" , "sneak peak", "soft launch for Fall" , "OK finally taking orders". Earlier Mac Pros were not preceded by 18 months of Osborne effect. That isn't a justification. That is what was done.
The notion that the demand was highly transparent and easily gauged in the muddled roll out is highly unmotivated.
This Mac Pro's roll out was not even remotely close to a typical Apple incremental product upgrade roll out. If in a highly abnormal situation why expecting typical outcomes?
A wait of up to (potentially) almost three months for an ordered product is a very long time when Apple's competitors can ship a workstation in 24 hours. Yes, I am sure it is very good and for many worth the wait. But no, one should not have to wait.
It isn't 3 months. There is a rolling about two month window that isn't getting smaller. It is also not the same time windows for everyone.
As for competitors, First, they don't ship Macs. OS X isn't licensed to run on those machines. Second, those competitors have been shipping Xeon E5, generally competing systems (migrate to off OS X ) for 14-18 months before Apple shipped the Mac Pro. The "forward" 24 hours are diddly poo compare to the vastly longer period where Apple had basically nothing but 2009-2010 era hardware to sell. Folks extremely pressed about getting what they want as fast as possible are largely already gone. What is left over is a high fraction of folks willing to wait.
Apple cut off EU sales in Feb 2013. If willing to wait 10 months... another 2 isn't that much more. ( that cut off is yet another example of how current context is atypical. )
IMHO Apple should have "backfilled" the demand in EU first and then widened the launch. At least for a couple of weeks. Demand project data for EU had to include a substantial amount of hand waving because they had not sold anything there in a long time. Fill in some of that data hole first and that adjust the just-in-time ordering queue. Frankly they did it completely backwards of that. Primarily lauched where they have more, but also limited data, and then let the part they knew least about clog up the order-to-production system. There is highly like gobs of noise in looking at what the intial waves are ordering because the contexts are so different.
