Mostly this is a non-technical issue. It is extremely likely it being driven by Apple's policy of not commenting on future products, but not wanting folks to believe that Mac Pro was dead when they were actually working on it. [and yes because it was indirect hints most people didn't get ..... they eventually had to fess up and say they are working on new Mac Pro's for next year. ]
Hence, Apple released "something". If go back over last 12 months of forum posting this has been ranted on several times. "Oh why doesn't Apple just release some minor speed bump just that we know they are still doing something". Well they did.
This release was the simplest thing they could do and so they did it. That triggered exactly the response from many in the press who ask the equivalent of "is this it?" (with the implication is this what you have been working on all this time ). To which Apple could respond with "no this isn't 'it', we are working on something better... ".
Of course that got bungled a bit into "all desktops are doom till 2013"... which is totally not true. So they eventually fessed up and said effectively "another Mac Pro will appear in 2013" .
If your question is "Why is this the only progress they made after two years?". Mostly likely that is because this speed bump wasn't the original plan. Something went wrong. Bad design that had to rebooted , bad management , subcontractors blew it, ............. there is long list of things that could have blown up the problem. It could have been several factors.
If Apple was on top of their game should that have been a problem No? But they weren't.
What Apple probably should have done is said "Hey we screwed up ..... during this somewhat long interim here is a minor speed bump ... we'll be back when we really finish " from the start with a minor press release. Probably would have been better the done last week out of the WWDC spotlight when the hysteria about WWDC turning in a "MacWorld" with the whole entire Mac line-up refresh loopiness was going on.
Why didn't they sat directly or indirectly "hey we screwed up" 6-10 months ago ? .... they probably didn't want to say it now, but having the other Macs refresh twice before the Mac Pro moved at all pretty much forced their hand. Throw on top of that all the competing workstations are also updating right now with the next generation. At this point they were highly motivated to do something. If Apple did nothing then by Sept-Nov it would be a conclusion drawn by more than a few that the Mac Pro was dead.
Limping out with 3 year old GPUs is bad. Widespread conclusions that the product is dead is morbid. I doubt Apple really had any "good" outcomes to choose from here. It was more like "bad , worse , or morbid .... take your pick Tim". He chose 'bad'.
P.S. the 'worse' option would have been to pull folks off what they should have done before, to work on putting 'lipstick on a pig' with new drivers and hardware to an old platform. Over the long term, it is far better time spent working on a far more viable new platform and getting it out the door sooner rather than later.
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