I can't believe oily finger prints held them back. I had a black MacBook and it was a magnet for finger prints.
For all we know, complaints over fingerprints were one of the lessons they learned when they canned that model! (It was cool, though, for sure.)
Apple makes really great-looking products, with great fit-and-finish, and a great software experience to boot. That makes even tiny flaws stand out, when they would go unnoticed in a more cheaply-made device.
For instance, I moaned over a slight curved unevenness in my old PowerBook G4’s lid gap. Then I looked at other (non-Apple) laptops all around me. They were worse! But you hardly noticed. Yet the flaw stood out amid Apple’s perfect, simple, aluminum lines and uncluttered design (not crawling with PC-style vents and hatches and screw holes and painted plastic).
Heck, my friend’s Dell’s DVD drive cover fell right off, and I barely noticed! You know if that happened to 10 owners of a mass-selling Apple product it would be: “surprisingly widespread manufacturing woes leave Apple’s laptop future murky.”
If this rumor is true, Apple made the right call: building/stocking two separate sets of models is an expensive proposition if what it gets them is just a blog-hyped “fingergate” scandal. And 99.999% of people who would want a black Air (maybe even me) will still settle for a silver one; and Apple hasn’t lost a customer then.